You're my people now
by csfcsf
Summary: It was meant to be just like old times, a case and an evening in Baker Street. When a bullet crashes the window pane it becomes a new case they are forced to play out from almost no clues left behind. Disclaimer: I don't own these characters or their previous feats. (Obviously.) Also: first fan-fic alert on this one.
1. Chapter 1

Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were coming back from Scotland Yard to 221B Baker Street, late in the evening. They had been to catch up with DI Lestrade but didn't get much leads about the case. The two men's spirits weren't exactly low but they looked tired. They decided to leave the rest to the morning.

As they get off the cab at Baker Street, John is on the phone with Mary, she has some reason to be somewhere else and John isn't about to go home alone, he'll talk Mrs Hudson into letting him stay in his old room for the night, or on the long sofa in the living room. He smiles for a second into what is perceivable to be Mary's argument against the sofa. All the while Sherlock is paying the cab driver, but looking interested in the conversation (like he's defending his sofa...). John notices and stiffens. 'No, I was shot in the shoulder', he corrects her, tense, now, 'but that was a long time ago, I'll be fine, Mary.' He says goodbye hastily, as they get off the cab.

'So, Mary thinks the sofa...'

John halts, forcing Sherlock half way between the cab and the street, in an uncomfortable position. 'Oh, look!' he says sarcastic, looking around them, 'this is not Afghanistan!'

'Point taken', he murmurs, as if childishly upset for his friend's words, but as soon as John turns to the door, his gaze looks worried. John would never let on if anything was wrong. Somehow, Sherlock cared, he worried, and that was silly. John was a doctor and a soldier at heart, he knew how to care for himself.

The cold brisk air outside made them wrap up on their coats. John went to the door, but Sherlock stopped short. Something wasn't right, he felt, as he looked around. He couldn't quite put the finger on it, but something was amiss... No, it must be his own exhaustion. And inside Baker Street they'd be safe, they were always safe in Baker Street. Just like the old times. The old times, they still came around, less often now, but they still came, and this night was one. The fireplace could be lit, the electric lights outside, the cars driving by on the wet pavement, all were familiar sounds.

Before Sherlock could get up the stairs, Mrs Hudson came out with a parcel.

'Oh, you two, is just like old times, isn't it?'

Sherlock extended his hand to the parcel, acting annoyed, he could see the markings with his name, and why else would she carry the parcel in her hand to the landing? John just smiled, and carried on up, unbuttoning his coat. Familiarity. After all he had spent years in that place. His and Mary's apartment was nice, tidier, more luminous, more sanitary (without all the body parts experiments) but this place was clearly a reflection of Sherlock's own mind. Filled with all kinds of stimulus, organised with a very peculiar sense of tidiness. Honestly, John had lived there, but after he had left, the place had remained the same. Because almost the totality of it had always been Sherlock's stuff. And apart from his computer, his gun and an old mug, anything else, he hadn't cared much to part it from Baker Street. There were still those books in a shelf by John's chair, and other stuff, but they definitely belonged there now...

John opened the door to the living room, the yellowish light from the street poured in through the windows. The place felt cold, and John immediately flicked the switch to turn on the lights. The lamps all turned on at the same time, welcoming them home.

_Then it happened._ There was no warning, no way it could have been foreseen. Out of the silent street and through the window, probably from across the street. But that was hardly a consideration in John Watson's mind as the bullet that crossed the window pane crashed against his body immediately. The gunshot sound echoed instantly. A riffle, from a distance, John knew it as he lost balance and tried to step back, colliding against the wall behind him, facing the window, trying to see the person who had done it, who had taken the shot, trying to devise its reasons... Then it all came to him, all at once. The shock, the hot drizzle of blood over his skin, burning from the localized attack, it would then spread and magnify intensely, all his body was in pain, he could hardly tell where he had been hit, as he struggled to remain on his feet and face the shooter, to see him, to recognize him, he morbidly needed to know why he had been shot and how.

He heard the heavy footsteps of Sherlock up the stairs, at least two at a time, but he wouldn't let go of observing the window. He tried to warn his friend, it could happen again, but by now he had wasted too much time trying to understand it. All of a sudden, he realized, he couldn't really talk, and all the room was dissolving in a whirlwind.

Sherlock entered the room in a run, passing John by, as he leaned against the wall by the door. The window hadn't shattered, and only a small round ominous hole glistened in its sharp edges by the street light. Sherlock turned the lights off, evening the darkness in the room with the mist outside the window. He then forced shut the right window's wood panes in a dangerous decision. The shooter could fire again, even through the closed wood panels, but he'd have to go about it blindly now. The odds were in their favour. He glanced at the left side window, but before that he turned to check on John...

In three steps he had reached John. The darkness deceived him as to the real extent of the situation. He looked pale, vacant, but strong and proud. As Sherlock held him by the elbow his gaze grew more focused. His blue eyes faced Sherlock, he looked stunned. Before he could say anything, his knees must have given in, because he started to collapse to the floor, always upright, against the wall, a red stain registered his path on the wallpaper. Sherlock hastily grabbed his friend with both hands, but he couldn't stop it, the fall, the collapse of a hero. In a second they had both fallen to the floor. John sat with a vacant stare, Sherlock was the one keeping him from hitting the ground completely as he embraced him gently. 'John!'

Sherlock pushed one hand free, John's limp body was supported by Sherlock's other arm, and he pushed the coat open with unsteady hands. A small hole, a very specialized riffle, possibly a special army standard edition. But the small sized hole was not less dangerous for its size. The shirt was getting wetter and warmer, at the same time that John's life was falling deeper into danger. Sherlock grabbed his scarf and pressed it to him. John had done that once. John, healthy and in control, John the doctor, had done that, in the effort to save a life. Sherlock didn't know what to do, Sherlock wasn't a doctor, he had never discussed this sort of thing with John, he had no idea of what to do. Call an ambulance, of course, he was doing just that. He had let go of the scarf pressed against John's chest to dial the number on his phone, John's blood was all over his phone now.

He then threw away his phone to the floor, he felt useless. There was no more he could do but to wait. All the while John was there, in need of medical attention, and he could give him none. The scarf was getting red over blue, and it only covered one of the two wounds. The wooden floor under John was wet as well, as John kept slumping further to the ground, pushing Sherlock with him because he wouldn't let go.

'John, can you hear me?' Why on earth was he calling out his friend's name, he had been doing it all the while, he noticed. Because John's true presence there would have changed the whole situation. He would have known what to do. He was the other half of the partnership, the one that knew how to deal with that situation... Why would anyone want to shoot John? No, he had to stop, it wasn't the time for deductions. Not while his friend bled out on the floor.

John had turned the lights on, enabling a clear view of the room. The shooter wouldn't have mistaken John for Sherlock. It had been chosen that way...

'John!' He opened his eyes, relief came over Sherlock. He felt less alone, now. 'You got shot, John!' _Brilliant, Sherlock, brilliant impression of an idiot._ Why had he told him that? He could see the fear in John's eyes now. But also a fierce resolution. He was taking charge, taking some of the load off Sherlock... John wrinkled his face in pain, but a strong decided and dominant left hand came over Sherlock's unsteady hand with the tinted scarf. He felt it, he knew where it was even without looking, of course, but now he'd move Sherlock's hand out of the way, to look down on his wound. _Doctoring himself._

John's face was turning a strange shade of greyish pale. 'Medics', he said, with uneven breathing. A small mistake, he meant "ambulance, hospital, doctors". "Medics" was an army expression, from the time he was in the war zone.

'John, stay with me', again Sherlock was only copying what he had heard before, but he meant it sincerely. Those words meant something entirely different this time around. _Stay with me._

The blue intermittent lights of an ambulance arriving shot across the darkened living room. Sherlock broke eye contact with John for a second only, but by the time he looked back down his friend was unconscious again. The blue light over the red liquid's glossy surface...

The paramedics were there and Sherlock had to let go of his friend to their capable cold professional hands. Sherlock grabbed his phone off the floor with shaky hands. The stretcher, it looked so hard and uncomfortable for John. The cold outside as the ambulance stood with the engine on and the back doors open. John would be cold, it was so cold outside, could he feel the cold? Snowflakes were starting to fall on them. Mrs Hudson was by the door, shocked.

Sherlock entered the ambulance and it took off. He wrote some words in a text and sent it. Mrs Hudson needed someone by her side. Molly would come, she would... And Greg, he needed to know, Sherlock's flat was now a crime scene. Another text. Not even sure how to spell the words anymore. All the while, John was getting his clothes ripped open, exposed at the centre of the ambulance, and there was a lot of red. The colour red. He couldn't talk about what it meant, not now, just name the colour over the pale skin. It was the shoulder, the left one. Close to the ugly scar from John's past. The same shoulder, again. _No one dies of a shoulder wound_, people say. Except John. He had almost died of it in Afghanistan. John had never said it. But Sherlock knew. He had even glossed over John's medical file once, out of boredom. Upon his return to London, it had remained an unnamed weak spot. It caused spasms over his left hand. Twitches that intensified when he was angry, distracted. And what now? Shot again, and this time, with full disloyalty, where he was supposed to be safe, away from the war...

The Hospital, a large squared building, too sanitary, too clean, too live-less. John was entering through and the medical team rushed towards him. Someone pushed Sherlock aside. He tried to push through. John would never forgive him for abandoning his side after he got shot. But John was being wheeled away. Someone called his name. Sherlock turned. It was Greg Lestrade.

'Now we wait here', he told him, as he placed a confident hand over his shoulder in a friendly manner. 'He's a tough guy; John. He's been to war and back. You'll see...'

Sherlock's adrenaline was fading off all of a sudden. He felt drained, and cold. The police Inspector must have understood because he directed him to a hallway plastic seat. They both sat down, side by side, in silence, immobile.

'So, how did it happen?' Lestrade broke the silence after a while.

'Gunshot through the window. Baker Street... You should be investigating away, Greg.'

'I've got my best people there, Sherlock.'

'It's not enough.'

'It is for now.'

'You don't need to be here', Sherlock insisted, angry.

The other one was surprised. 'Of course I do. And also John is my friend. I worry about him too.'

'I should have known, it's my job.'

'Don't worry, we'll get this guy. You can concentrate in that as soon as John gets out of surgery... You know he'll need some rest, first, but then he'll be back at investigating cases away with you.'

The detective nodded slowly, his gaze fixed on the high windows of the doors leading to the corridor of the surgical rooms. A nurse was hurrying with the third blood bag that matched John's blood type. _No one dies of a shoulder wound._ All the scar tissue of the first wound was getting the patient in trouble. Suddenly the choice of aim was less and less a coincidence and much more an ugly deliberate choice.


	2. Chapter 2

-ooo-

Dr. John Watson woke up in easily recognizable settings. The cold white room, dominated by the bed and the medical equipment around it. He had no doubt he was in a Hospital. Actually the name of it was in the bed sheet trims. Yes, of course he'd be brought into _that_ one. It wasn't strange at all. And there was a small table with flowers. So, he'd been there a while now, asleep. Time enough for some people to stop by. The anaesthetics would probably account for the elapsed time. He must have been taken to surgery for the bullet removal. Left shoulder, again. No, not for removal, the bullet had gone through and exited the back, he thought he could remember that much. All the while, Sherlock was keeping a watchful eye on the front wound, he had been bleeding out through the back one. John had known it, he had also known that there was nothing Sherlock could have done about it so there had been no point in saying it and troubling him more. That was about all he remembered, so he must have lost consciousness then.

It suddenly hit him; he had been there for too long already. Sherlock was in danger. The bullet, it had hardly been meant for him, but for his friend. He had to warn him. Where was his phone? One wasn't supposed to use a phone in a Hospital because of the pressurized oxygen bottles, but he saw none beside him, and no duct over him. He'd have to risk it, to warn Sherlock. He was slowly pulling himself straight in the bed when Molly walked in, in her lab coat.

'Molly?'

She smiled, seemed relieved even. 'John, you're awake already. Sherlock just went home to take a shower - we insisted - he'll be right back.' As she spoke, she was picking up something from across the room, her back turned on him.

'He can't, it can be dangerous, I need to tell him...'

She turned sharply to him and stopped his words. 'Tell him that you were shot and so could he? I think it has crossed his mind, don't you think? Sherlock and Greg took all the precautions, John...' She talked to him like she was talking to a small silly child, he noticed, confused. 'I'll tell the nurse to stop by.'

'Why?'

'I think you're developing some infection. You're feverish. It could have been the bullet. It could have been the state of Sherlock's floor. You better have that looked up. Just don't worry about Sherlock. He's being careful.'

'Mrs Hudson...'

'He knows that. Sherlock has taken care of it all, John, stop worrying. And Greg is investigating too.'

John frowned. 'How come you have the bullet? That's the bullet, isn't it? What you came here for. You have the bullet but it was a through and through.'

She pressed her lips. 'Must have been caught in your clothes as they brought you here, John.'

'Oh, right.' He couldn't help closing his eyes, he felt very tired. He'd have to believe in Sherlock for now. That he'd take care of everything, that he'd protect everyone, that all was in his capable hands. John couldn't do it, not just yet.

Molly stepped out of the room quietly, as John fell asleep. Sherlock was in the hallway, waiting. 'Here's John's shirt, Sherlock', she handed him the ragged cloths in a transparent plastic bag. 'Are you sure you want to do this?'

'I have to. There was something in the bullet's coating, something that is crashing John's system. Maybe some sort of poison. I need to find it out, he must forgive me for not being by his bedside.'

'He'll understand', Molly offered.

'No, he won't. He'll think that I should have excused myself from this job, that I'm too close. But I can't just sit by his side and wait... How can people do that?'

Molly smiled sideways. 'He's lucky to have you, he'll see that much.'

'I have to make sure that happens.'

-ooo-

'What do you need me to do next?' Molly inquired to lean controlled figure stooping over the chromatographer, power wishing it to run faster. Sherlock looked back with a haggard expression. He couldn't hide from her how hard it had all been for him, nonstop up till now. And it wasn't over yet either.

'How is he?' Sherlock demanded to know. And yet, for the last six hours straight, Sherlock had refused to even go near John Watson's room again. The emotions could get in the way, he said. How blind could he be, that he didn't see that the emotions he was trying to shelter himself from had already taken over? He was a wreck, half of the investigator he had ever been. Just an hour ago, he had made a procedural mistake that had cost him half an hour's time. Maybe John's view was right and Sherlock should have excused himself. But relinquishing the control wasn't his choice, couldn't have been a real choice for the detective.

The machine beeped and the printer started to run paper. They both rushed in. Too much data, too many components, they had to sort through all of them to pin point the relevant data... Even with the solution in their hands, the mystery fought to remain.

'There!' Sherlock shouted, demanding. 'I was right! Even if the bullet missed the vital organs, there would still be a poison to finish John off. Whoever is behind this, oh, he's clever, he's methodical...'

'Sherlock!' She was shocked by his gloating, his appreciation of the crime.

'What?!' He stopped short, couldn't tell what was going on.

'We need to let the doctor know. Hopefully it's not too late...' Molly pointed out.

He froze as she sped up to the internal telephone. 'What do you mean _too late_? We solved it. We know what it is!'

Molly was holding the phone. She conveyed the message and didn't reply until it was done. Then she faced him, sober. 'It's been causing damage all this time, Sherlock.'

'He's a tough guy', he'd repeat Lestrade's words, with uneasiness.

'He's been hurt a lot.'

'He was in the war.' (A war hero.)

'And on your cases together as well. He got used for leverage more than once, he tried to be your bodyguard when Jim Moriarty was circling in on you, and he always soldiered on through it all, because he always meant his actions as true genuine generosity. He always hid from you the pain, it must have hurt... Did you even know about that?' she doubted, with a sad expression.

'Of course I did. He's not like that, he doesn't brood over those things.'

'Exactly. But it doesn't erase the fact that he had a hard time in that surgery room. Sherlock, what I'm trying to say is... Just don't go pushing him along in your running around just because he tells you he's fine. I'm sure he'll tell you he's fine. He's not. He won't be for a while. And he'll never admit it.'

He'd hear her words, but he couldn't quite take them to heart. He believed he knew John H. Watson better than Molly did, anyway.

-ooo-

'Toxic poisoning from the bullet's coating', John repeated slowly, admiringly even. He had been Sherlock Holmes client this time, and Sherlock had faithfully solved the case.

Slowly John was getting his coat back on. The left arm cradled by a fabric strip, immobilizing it against his chest. He felt the need to add: 'Maybe an old riffle from the Soviet republic? There were some cases like that there. And I'm sure it was a riffle by the bullet size and the distance. A pistol would have been less accurate.'

'You could have done that shot with a pistol', Sherlock pointed out, in a flat voice, seating in the visitor's chair with his hands pressed together, thinking.

John glanced at him, uncertain what he meant by it. A compliment, a correction, a new theory?

'Anyway, someone was really aiming at offing the first person entering Baker Street.'

Sherlock lowered his hands, hesitating for a second. But he felt he owed it to John, the truth - or the most of it.

'The shooter wanted you, John. He had plenty of opportunity to distinguish you from me.'

'Me? Why would anyone want me?!'

He didn't seem frightened at all. Honestly, Sherlock could recognize that there was an exhilaration emanating from John now, the man of action that had been imprisoned in a Hospital for too long. What he failed to perceive was that there was also relief in John to find that he was the intended target; he could take care of himself, protecting Sherlock would have been much harder when he felt so tired to begin with.

Sherlock held the room door open to let John through, the simple daily gestures were going to be harder now for John. Yet he already had a puzzling dexterity with just his non-dominant arm, one that echoed the fact it wasn't the first time he was in that situation.

'And', John added, confused, 'how did the shooter know that I'd be at Baker Street? I don't live there anymore, Sherlock. How did the shooter know that he could find me entering your living room that night?'

Sherlock raised a brow. John had never been particularly methodical in his analysis processes, but every once in a while, he'd hit the most important notes even without going through all the intermediary steps.

'I hadn't decided on it myself until the cab pulled over at 221B', John insisted. 'How could the shooter be after me in a place I didn't even know I was going to?' He kept persisting in a point already made but this time Sherlock wouldn't point it out. Somehow he was enjoying hearing him talk and talk. Not for what he was actually saying. It just felt nice to hear his voice, controlled, pondered, after the shock of the recent events. Thank goodness John didn't want to discuss what had happened. He was too much the tough guy to talk about it and that was a relief to Sherlock, he didn't want to go around having to relive it. If John wanted to talk about the future and ignore the event, that suited Sherlock just fine.

Sherlock hailed a cab as soon as they got out of the building.

'And I came up the stairs first, you stayed behind with Mrs Hudson. What if you had come up first, would he have shot you instead?'

Sherlock opened the cab door and entered first. That way John sat next to the door, he could close it with the right functional arm. Which he did, not surprised at all that Sherlock had to get in first.

'John, we're going to Baker Street.'

'What?'

'Till Mary comes back, you can stay at Baker Street. Back to our original plan... Don't worry', he added, 'I tapped over the bullet hole in the window, it was getting chilly.'

John looked confused. If Sherlock was expecting protests from the man being taken to where he had been shot, he heard none. 'Alright', he said, welcoming going back to Baker Street. What had happened there had hardly changed years of a homely feeling to that place. And it was the right place to start investigating what had happened and how to stop it from repeating.

John was looking straight forward, Sherlock couldn't help himself from staring into his friend's face.


	3. Chapter 3

-ooo-

221B Baker Street. Daylight flooding the room. Sherlock enters first, taking off his gloves. He looks behind him, waiting for John to finish up the stairs. John comes in second, somewhat controlled. He looks around and he finds the spot at once. There's no sugar coating it. The red stain on the floor soaked through the boards, the old wood floor was too porous. Someone had tried to clean the mess up, obviously. Probably sweet Mrs Hudson. And someone had also ripped the wallpaper of the wall, leaving it bare for the moment. There was no stain on the wall, but there was plenty on the floor.

'Won't that scare the clients off?' he remarks, pointing at the floor.

'That's of no concern to me right now', Sherlock brushes it off. As he walks by he steps on the stain, carelessly. John follows him, circling around it, to the kitchen.

'You've been to the opposite flats, I suppose. You know where the bullet was fired from', John started, usually it didn't take much to trick Sherlock into sharing his deductions. A vain compliment disguised as a statement and off he spilled the story out. At least to John, he'd compromise in letting him catch up.

Sherlock glanced at him as he got some tea on, in mechanic gestures. 'Yes, I've been there. The flat was empty to let. The lock on the door was forced. None of the neighbours saw something useful.'

'But surely they got startled with the gunshot. Someone must have called the police.'

'Yes, they did.'

'But they saw nothing none the less... Poor Mrs Hudson, Home Owners Association will give her even more hell for having us here.'

'They tried.' He smiled. 'She told them off.'

'Really?' John was surprised.

'She's very protective of the people she cares for.' (You know that, John.) Sherlock felt embarrassed now, need he really spell it all out for John? Couldn't he add things up on his own?

He tilted his head sideways. 'She's always been very protective of _you_. But I was just... a tenant.'

Sherlock frowned. 'Well, she always offered you tea', he cut short, abruptly. 'And she watched you being carried out of here in a stretcher, so you might come up with something nicer to say to her.'

John's left hand twitched, and he took the other hand over it. 'You know I care about her. She's always done right by me. She's been more of a mother to me...' He stopped all of a sudden, registering the words he couldn't say to end his sentence. 'I'm going to sit down for a second', and he turned around, in a brisk manner. But he halted suddenly. 'You are, of course, sure that it's safe to have the window blinds open like this, Sherlock.'

'Quite sure.'

'Okay, then.'

John took a seat in his old chair, facing the peaceful light coming in from the window. It was all so eerie. Just a few hours ago he was lying on a Hospital bed. Now he was in Baker Street. Where he was immediately before he had got rushed to the Hospital. And that hardly added up to any sense. He closed his eyes for a second. Somewhere, he could have sworn it was very far away from there and yet so close, the soft comforting sound of a violin being played filled the space. Must be Sherlock. Odd time to play the violin, but then again he wasn't like everyone else. It must have been tough on Sherlock. He really wasn't into Hospitals and patients. He preferred to see it as cases, not people. This time it had worked out for the best, John had to agree. Sherlock hadn't needed him at all, either. Just another mischievous case foiled by the hat detective. Hopefully it was the end of it, too. For now, he'd just sleep for a couple of minutes, that would make it right.


	4. Chapter 4

-ooo-

'Come in, Greg', Sherlock stated what to him was way too obvious to be said out loud in normal circumstances. But that day had very little normal to it, so he decided to go mainstream that one time...

Detective Inspector Greg Lestrade entered Baker Street once again. As a professional habit he'd look all around before even saying a word. The fireplace was lit, and John was next to it, sitting in his chair, seemingly fast asleep. That was strange to look at. Controlled stiff John laying back on the chair, more relaxed than Greg had ever seen him before in his life, all the while he was in the same room that just over a day ago he had been shot, almost fatally shot. Greg couldn't help looking down on the floor, he was already stepping on it. The red stain of blood on the floor. He stepped back, and looked over at Sherlock without being able to hide the shock. How could they both stand there as if nothing had happened? They were nuts, those two.

'He's been sleeping for the past four hours. I believe it's normal, due to the medication. But you can wake him up if you like.'

Greg looked over at John again. On the small round table next to him there was an assorted collection of mugs, all seemed full of darkened cold liquids. 'You made him tea. Several times.'

Sherlock looked over before saying: 'I thought he might want some. But he didn't wake up.'

'Why not reuse the same cup?'

He shrugged his shoulders. 'Why?! I had extra cups.'

'Never mind... So, how have you been doing?'

'I've been catching up on my research on the dissolution of sugar crystals in different temperature tea.'

'Oh, so all of John's teas actually have different amounts of sugar in it?' That explained the kindness; it was merely the leftovers of experiments.

Sherlock frowned, looking at him like that was silly. 'No, he doesn't take sugar. Everybody knows that...'

'Yeah, of course they do... Look, Sherlock...'

'Do you want a cup of tea?'

'What? yeah, fine, sure.'

'What concentration of sucrose-based solute do you prefer?' he asked, choosing from several cups in front of him.

'Actually, never mind...'

'So, what was it you wanted?'

The inspector looked over at the chair to make sure John was really asleep before saying: 'The shooter. You have to consider the possibility John was the intended target.' Sherlock was visibly bored and about to change the conversation. 'And in that case, we need to figure out why, and fast. If they try that again on John, he won't pull through again. It's serious, Sherlock. Unlike the movies, it's actually not that much of a current procedure to have hits on people in London. That was a hit and you know it. You need to let me in on everything, Sherlock. You'll need an assistant to help you through, it's how you work, and it's hardly going to be John this time, helping to figure out his own hit...'

'Why not?' he couldn't understand. 'He's already been helping me out. I won't run him as hard, Greg, I know he's got his strengths down.'

'Sherlock, it's hardly human to make him relive all that...'

'If you got shot by a sniper wouldn't you want to know why? Wouldn't you help me figuring it out?' he asked passionately.

'He is okay with it? Really?' the detective inspector was stunned.

'Yes. _He's a tough guy_, remember?'

'And you'll take care of John? He won't live off just tea cups, you know?'

'If it were the other way around you wouldn't be saying that to him, would you?!'

'You brought him back to where he got shot! He's sleeping by his blood stain! Sherlock...!'

'He's fine, he really is...' his friend minimized.

The inspector took a deep breath. 'Fine, just make sure of that _often_, will you?'

'What does that even mean?!'

'Just do that, okay?' he insisted. Sherlock Holmes wouldn't answer. 'And about the bullet coating? Any leads there?'

'The bullet was somewhat degraded after it hit the wall behind John, but there was enough of it to determine the exact chemical composition of the bulk. And Molly and I took the shirt to analyse the blood stain for traces of the coating.'

'Heavy metals?'

'I thought so at first, but no. Turns out there were nitrates in the coating, the kind often found in pesticides.'

'John was poisoned by a farmer's bullet? That doesn't add up, Sherlock.'

'No', he was clearly impatient. 'It just means that the bullet was coated with some heat and pressure resistant substance embedded in pesticides. That substance was water soluble and in contact with John's blood stream it melted away releasing the nitrates, thus poisoning him. There was method, Greg, can't you see? If the bullet didn't hit any of the major organs, it'd still kill him in the end. More than that, John's murder was planned like that. They shot him in the left shoulder for a reason. They shot him in the same shoulder he was shot at in Afghanistan as a message. The shooter knows his past, he knew it wasn't the first time. He knew there was scar tissue from the last time all over his shoulder, and that it'd would slow the bullet down and prolong the exposure to the nitrates. All this time he could have just shot him in the head, but no, he wanted to convey his message.'

'John was shot in the shoulder when he was in the army? Really?' Greg was stunned. 'I thought he had just been shot in the leg, he had a limp.' Sherlock was silent but tensely pacing the kitchen. 'A message, you said the shooting was a message? To whom? To John? To you?'

Sherlock shook his head. 'John has no idea of who it might have been. He's convinced that it wasn't someone from his army days.'

'You mean that it had to be someone who knew about the war injuries.'

'Of course it has to be, it was deliberate!'

'Someone from the enemy side?'

'After all this time why come after one army doctor in particular?' he dismissed it.

'Someone that got hold of his medical file, then?'

'Yes, someone did. But it's not easy. Who could have done it?'

'What does John think about all this?'

'I don't know, I didn't ask', Sherlock dismissed.

'So, you didn't tell him.'

'Tell him what?'

Greg shook his head. 'Never mind. Just be careful, Sherlock, and take some care of him, he would do the same for you, you know he would. And keep me updated.' Sherlock waved him off. Greg just walked away, with a sharp glance at John. He was still sitting back on his chair, but his expression was much less relaxed now. Greg thought it was nice that John had slept all through that conversation. He then walked out, circling the red blood stain on the floor. Stepping on his friend's blood was still too shocking for him.

As Greg closed the door downstairs, Sherlock was by the window, peering out. He then turned his face towards John. He was staring into the flames in the hearth.

John didn't bother pretending he had just woken up. He looked back at his friend. Sherlock could tell he hadn't slept a minute of the time he had been on that chair. All the tea cups, he'd lie now to excuse himself from not wishing to reconnect with the world, to discuss his injury with Sherlock, instead had pretended to sleep while Sherlock played the violin, and then carried on his usual experiments. He had needed to recess somewhere inside himself, to try to find a logic to what had happened.

Sherlock knew John had been listening in on all the conversation. It had been one way of letting him know the facts. Greg was wrong because of all the social conventions. John preferred to know. It was also a requirement to keep him safe.

'Want some tea?' Sherlock asked out loud.

'Yeah, my turn to make some', he stated as he bravely got up from the chair in controlled movements. 'You want some? Just for drinking this time... no science.'

'If you must...' (If you must keep me from my experiments when easily we could do both as save me the time...)

Sherlock watched John go into the kitchen with some apprehension. John was sure he could make the tea, and sure enough he was going on at it one handed with the usual speed of both hands.

There were footsteps on the stairs and then there she was, Mrs Hudson, coming up, she honestly spent as much time in 221B as she did in 221A, and she was getting in through the kitchen door...

'John, you mustn't be doing that!?' she darted an accusing look towards Sherlock and tried to persuade John to let go of the porcelain cups and seat back down, all the while he ignored her protests and insisted there was enough tea for her as well, she had had quite a shock, a nice cup of tea would be just the thing for her.

'Mrs Hudson, I'm perfectly capable of making everyone a cup of tea...'

'John, you need to rest, have a seat, dear.'

'No, I really don't need to...'

'John, it's me, Mrs Hudson, you don't need to be all brave to me, I rather have you sit down and enjoy a nice cup of tea.'

'So my cups aren't as nice?!' he misinterpreted, whether on purpose or not, Sherlock wouldn't be able to tell, as he picked his violin up from the long sofa.

'Your cups are just lovely, dear, and you really must sit down now. You are looking very pale at the moment...'

Sherlock turned towards them again, laying down the violin. He went towards them as John actually took a seat in the nearest chair. He was silent and restraint, she was pursing her lips while looking over at Sherlock. John slid his gaze from Mrs Hudson over to Sherlock and there was some anger in his eyes as he told him simply: 'I'm going to need a lighter, a hand mirror, a needle and some sewing thread. It has reopened in the front.'

'You can't do it yourself, John', his friend was blunt.

'I'm not going back to the Hospital over such a small thing, Sherlock.'

'Yes, you are.'

'When I'm there, I'm in a lot more danger, you know that. I'm safer here.'

'Well, I'm not doing it, and you won't be able to do it to yourself.'

He laughed dryly. 'I was in a war scenario. Do you really think it'll be my first time sewing my wounds up?' He got up on his own and moved on to the bathroom. Sherlock exchanged a worried look with Mrs Hudson before following him. He didn't agree with it but he'd assist if he must.

Not even five minutes later they were back at the living room. Sherlock was actually sideways directing John's walk to the chair. John's face was drained and he looked weak, his shirt had a small blood stain by his left shoulder. Sherlock helped him down on the tapestry seat, he'd close his eyes for a minute. Mrs Hudson came join them and sat opposite John, in Sherlock's chair. Sherlock picked up his violin once again and started playing gently the vibrant chords. This time he watched John actually falling asleep in the chair as he kept playing and the sound filled the whole room around him.


	5. Chapter 5

_A/N: Chapter 5, in which Mary "enters the stage". I suppose a warning should already have been made that I wrote myself into a corner when it came to post S3 Mary. On a bad flu and a __recent _S3 hangover at the time I was writing this, my Mary is post S3 reveal, not pregnant _or a mother _(I offer no detail on reasons but it caused unspoken strain), and much darker than the average take on her (for 2,5 episodes out of 3 we only had access to sweet smart Mary - this is my take on the full Mary). She does love John deeply, but in a very feral and protective way that sometimes bends ethics.

_'Because John can't ever know that I lied to him. It would break him, and I would loose him for ever, and Sherlock, I will never let that happen.' -Mary Watson_

_PS: I kept my disclaimer (I own none of the characters here) in the summary, but it applies throughout this story._

* * *

-ooo-

'It's customary', Molly explained bluntly to Sherlock as she handed him the get-better flowers that she had brought for John Watson.

'He'll be... hm... delighted', Sherlock Holmes patched up some words. He then dropped the flowers on the desk.

'So, he's sleeping?' she asked, looking over at John.

'Yes, sorry about that, he really needs to sleep...'

'He's _really _sleeping?'

'_Yes_', Sherlock confirmed solemnly. 'He really is.'

'And you're tracking down the shooter. Had any luck yet?'

'There's a list, I'm narrowing it down.'

'Of people who want him dead?'

'No, not much luck there. People actually seem to like him. I guess they never had him hid their cigarettes from them for weeks in a row... No, of people who had the ability to do it. The shot, it was a good shot, an expert shot.'

'John's short, but he's not that small of a target, Sherlock.' She reproached him with a hint of a smile.

'The shooter aimed specifically to the left shoulder, I'm sure of that. And he left by the route he had planned in advance. He...'

Their conversation halted suddenly with a newcomer pacing up the stairs. Sherlock rolled his eyes. _Everybody kept coming there and talking about how John should rest and Sherlock should catch the shooter, all the while interrupting them._

Sherlock stepped forward. 'Mary, he's alright.'

She grabbed him by the arm and brushed him aside by force, on her way to John. She completely ignored Molly Hooper, and halted at the sight of John in the chair by the fireplace. Mary knelt by the chair and placed her hand over John's right hand.

'He really needs to rest, Mary, but I can tell you that...'

She interrupted him, with little care for his feelings: 'Shut up, Sherlock, you stop talking now... John, John, please wake up!'

Molly looked over at Sherlock, seeing a slightly guilty expression in his face. John had been shot in his place, after all. And Mary was clinging to that, and waking John up to hear him say he was okay, in a lopsided love. 'John.' Mary looked relieved when he woke up, and focused on her through the exhaustion.

'Mary.' He smiled. 'You're here.'

'I came as fast as I could. How are you?'

'I'm alright now, Mary, I really am, please don't worry.' He looked around the room and saw Sherlock and Molly there as well. 'You look tired, have a seat. Sherlock, would you mind?' he directed her to his friend chair. She refused it, she didn't want to let go. He then re-accommodated himself in the chair slowly to have her seat on the chair's arm, by the warm fireplace. He was possibly less comfortable now, Molly noticed, as she decided to take the chair in front of them, Sherlock's chair. Sherlock himself went into the kitchen to bring some coffee for Mary.

Molly had been at the wedding, her invitation had come from John (and Sherlock) not as much as from Mary. She still felt as if she didn't really know Mary, and sometimes there was something in Mary that put Molly off. Some sort of egotistical love for John Watson, that was more of a love for the love in itself than for the object loved. One moment she was sweet, and John needed someone sweet to balance his stiffness (worse now that he was vulnerable), the next she was a bit abrasive in her conversations with John and Sherlock. Not that they saw it like that. They treated her as one of the guys. And John loved her, but in a different mechanism all together than Mary seemed to be loving him back. That evening, Molly decided to turn her attention to John, in a way she had never really done before. And to protect him, because Molly would stand up for anyone who wasn't standing up enough for themselves (more than she'd ever be able to stand for herself, really).

Possibly because she was looking at John, sharing his chair with Mary, and it reminded her of another time, a Christmas party John had set (even if Sherlock's pretended to complain the whole time) with all their friends. John was the one making sure everyone had drinks and was happy all around, then he sat down with his girlfriend at the time, a tall brunette, sharing that same chair. He gave her the seat and took the chair's arm. He had sat there, having her back, including her in the party by having her take his position while he laboured to make it all perfect. Why had Molly thought of that? That party hadn't turned out for the best, even with John's efforts. And today Molly watched John with his wife. The opposite positions at the moment. But Mary's attitude was not of caring protection, she was hovering over John, dominating him. Could it all be in Molly's head? After all, it had been quite a shock to Mary, maybe she needed all that fierceness to assess her control over the situation...

'Thank you for taking care of John, Sherlock. I'll handle it from now on', she stated, coldly despite her smile. John looked up to her, surprised.

'He's safer here, Mary. He should stay. _You can both stay_', Sherlock negotiated.

'He was shot here.'

'We made sure it won't happen again.'

Molly wondered who was _we_. It was all Sherlock doing. Maybe a bit of help from his brother. Definitely not John, he hadn't the head in the game as yet. Mary seemed convinced he meant himself and John, though. And she hesitated. Did Sherlock just strategically put Mary in a position of having to accept Sherlock's offer to stay in Baker Street or to openly go against her frail health husband? All in front of John, who had hardly noticed any of this interaction?

'Okay, at least for now', Mary conceited. 'I can go home and grab an overnight bag for the both of us.'

'Sherlock,' John started, kind-heartedly, 'she shouldn't go alone. I mean...' he looked over at Mary again, 'I know you can take care of yourself, still...'

Molly stepped in the conversation. 'You can give me the keys. I can take care of that. I'm quite different from Mary, no one will mistake me. And you won't have to leave John, Mary.'

'Well, Maddie...' Mary started, maybe on purpose.

'Molly', John corrected, at once, innocent.

'Yes, Molly, I...'

'We...' John corrected, patient. 'We really appreciate it, Molly, but maybe you can go with her, Sherlock?'

Molly noticed: 'Then there would be no point in me going at all.'

'Sherlock packs the most outrageous things and forgets the basics, really', John fixed it. And it was actually true. '_Don't let him go alone, please,_ or there'll be nothing right in the bag.'

She smiled softly, she understood what he meant. He couldn't go and protect Sherlock, Mary was pissed at Sherlock because of where it had happened. And John saw it all as it unfolded. He might not have said a word as he could help it but he saw it. John's heart had been the reason Sherlock had developed his own since they met.

'We can do that', Molly assented, looking at Sherlock. He nodded, tense. Leaving John was not a grateful thing for him to do. And he knew Mary could protect John in ways that poor Molly would never really suspect...

'Anything in particular you two need?' Molly asked them, as she grabbed her coat.

'My gun', John answered calmly. 'Sherlock can easily guess where it is.'

'You won't be able to shot it', Molly pointed out his wrapped up arm.

Sherlock cut in: 'Actually he's a great right handed shooter. For some strange reason he decided to learn to shot with both hands. Came in _handy_, I suppose.' Molly faked a smile to accompany the comment and left just behind Sherlock.

-ooo-

'Of course you can both stay in the spare bedroom upstairs!' Mrs Hudson agreed at once, John had just got up to ask her that, she had just come upstairs to the kitchen, hovering over all those similar cups of tea. As John listened, Mary was smiling sweetly behind him. 'Are you sure you're going to be comfortable there, John? I'll get you both extra blankets, I just got the heating on upstairs...'

'That is perfect, it really is', he assured her honestly, and behind him Mary went upstairs for a second. After all, she had never been upstairs.

'Your old bedroom, John. Remember all those times you used to come down and watch telly with me?' She gently laid her hand on his arm, and he smiled. She smiled too. He was less tense now. More like the John she was used to. Ever since that business in Saint Bart's... she couldn't still name it out loud... he had become different. Then Mary had come along. She thought Mary would set him right again. But he hadn't changed. Then Sherlock came back, and she thought maybe then he would let his guard back down. But she had been wrong both times. There was a soft heart in John Watson, one he fought to hide under the soldier façade. Now he had been shot, he was struggling to keep up with the act. She could see his hurt more openly, but also his kind heart.

'Don't tell Sherlock, but I miss watching those soaps.'

She smiled to him. 'How about some dinner. I can fix you up something, John.' He tried to refuse but she wouldn't let it go. She had him sit back down on his chair and then left to go downstairs. He stood there watching her leave with half a smile and a pensive mood.

-ooo-

The Watson's house was simple, modest, clean, unpretentious. Sherlock and Molly entered it with John's keys and went straight to work.

Molly hadn't quite realized that John had spoken truthfully when stating that Sherlock's way of wrapping up an overnight bag was unorthodox. Or maybe he did that to mess with John. She made sure he had a clean change of clothes as he gathered whimsical nonsense pieces into the bag.

Sherlock was distracted, and he knew it. Usually he could focus his mental process better than anyone else, but today it felt lost in a multitude of directions. Multiple thoughts about different things all darting across his brain in every direction, he could hardly catch up. Maybe he needed to give himself a break, to have some rest. But how could he, when he still recalled so well how John's warm blood felt drizzling though his fingers. He couldn't stop just yet. Not until the memories washed out a bit...

'Sherlock, he doesn't need his alarm clock, what are you doing?'

Molly was there, kind Molly, but she couldn't really _understand_.

'I can't stay here any longer.' (I need to go back, Molly. I need to be _there_.)

'Have you got the gun?' she asked him after a moment's silence.

'In my pocket.'

'Then we should go now.'

'The bags' not ready.'

'It doesn't really matter', she assured him, confusing him.


	6. Chapter 6

_(Another) A/N: Thanks to "Guest reviewer", who has taken the time to point out misspellings, that I'll try to rectify in the future. I understand how aggravating it is to read a text and be startled by nonsensical words, vaguely similar to the intended ones. Apologies to everyone who may come across my blunders. English is not my first language and I'll keep doing my best._

_Hobbit-Sized Writer: I know, my Mary is creepy, even for me. :) _

_-cfs_

* * *

-ooo-

John seemed to be gaining strengths by the hour. He was seating upright in his armchair, actually sipping Mrs Hudson's tea. Sherlock was tickling sporadically the violin chords, as he held the violin in his lap, across from John. Mary and Mrs Hudson had just gone upstairs to the old bedroom to take more blankets in. Night had settled its darkness along the street outside the windows.

'So, how's the investigation going?' Sherlock looked over at him. John pushed aside his tea cup onto the small table. '_My _investigation, Sherlock. I gathered someone has been checking my army file. Of course there are people who knew, and people who might have know, where I had been shot before. What I don't get is_ why now_. Why try to kill me now.'

'Because of me, Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective', he said, somewhat cold, but John could sense the hurt in his voice. He felt guilty. They sat facing each other honestly, but they couldn't speak the truer words each meant to say.

'Better me than you', John tried to tell him that he didn't blame him, but it didn't come out right. If it had been the other way around, John wouldn't do such a good work pursuing the shooter... Sherlock remained completely motionless, but his eyes narrowed. 'Are you okay? You have been through a lot, Sherlock. You need to rest too. Everyone is trying to make sure I rest, they don't understand how this has been for you. Or if they do, they feel they can't say it out loud because of me. So, I'll say it myself: you need to rest. We can go back to solving this later on. You know we're safe here. We're always safe here.'

'You got shot here.'

'I still feel safe here, I really do', he assured his friend quietly.

'Mary wanted to take you home.'

'I'm glad she agreed to stay for the night.'

'Okay...' Sherlock got up in an energetic move and got to the desk. 'What if Moriarty is really alive and it was him?' He was looking for some papers in particular.

'That's crazy, he's dead. You know that for a fact. Besides, he wouldn't be after me, he'd be after you. Why would I be important to him?'

Sherlock looked away. Because losing John would have crushed him to pieces indeterminately, that's what he couldn't voice out loud. The guilt, the loneliness. How could John not see his importance?

'Maybe he had a plan to get to me and needed to make sure you wouldn't...' He stopped talking, Mary was coming downstairs. Sherlock wondered; had she heard him? Now she would never let go of John...

'And my gun?' John insisted, more cryptic now.

'In your bag', he pointed out.

'Then it's settled, Sherlock?'

'Yes. Tomorrow.'

Mary frowned at those two. She knew they were already onto something.

-ooo-

When Mary got up the next morning, John was already downstairs in the kitchen with Sherlock. She could hear the murmurs of their conversation through the thin walls. She got a robe on and came down at once. She'd find John and Sherlock at the kitchen table, hovered by a very busy Mrs Hudson that insisted that both her boys get extra portions of all food and beverages around. Sherlock had a pretentious silk gown wrapped around his shirt and trousers, John had found himself some lost snugly oatmeal wool jumper from the past, his left arm still cradled next to his chest. Greg Lestrade was also there, standing up, all formal and lecturing to the pair, and all nice and respectful to Mrs Hudson. 'I already had some coffee today, Mrs Hudson, you're very kind.'

She turned her attention elsewhere. 'Then who's going to have the extra toasts, John, if not you? I'll be needing to talk to Mary, she should know that when you don't have a good breakfast you get cranky all day long. She'll thank me for that piece of information, I tell you.'

'Mrs Hudson, I'm not cranky...!' he assured her, stiffly.

'See? Just have the toasts already, dear.'

Sherlock pretended not to smile as he followed their interaction. Next she'd be convincing him to go watch soaps together...

Mary entered the kitchen stating: 'You're all up early!' Greg noticed that neither Sherlock nor John answered her, and looked away. John looked much better though, so that mustn't had been the reason they both got up early, phoned him and invited him in to discuss the case... was it?

-ooo-

_'John?'_

_Sherlock exited his bedroom with some apprehension. The windows filtered in the early light of dawn over London. Sherlock had heard footstep noises, not sure what they meant, but he was sure they were John's and not some intruder. He crossed the cold empty kitchen into the living room. There he was. Peering through a gap in the window blinds onto the street. 'What is it?'_

_John looked back, caught by surprise, jumpy, feverish. 'What is what? You mean outside? There's nothing outside, Sherlock. I was just...' he walked away from the window cradling his left arm. 'I was checking the bullets trajectory, Sherlock. I know I said it could wait, but I couldn't sleep anymore. I must have woken you', he realized only then._

_'It's okay... You won't go back to bed? Mary might awake soon if she realizes you're not there.'_

_'No, I... can't sleep right now.'_

_'Is it the same reason as before?' Sherlock asked, hopefully masking the word "nightmares" enough to let John answer despite himself._

_He looked haggard. 'Maybe.'_

_'Well, it's morning already', Sherlock pointed out._

_'Yeah, and I should have a shower. No, no, I can manage! I'm fine... Sherlock?'_

_'Hm?'_

_'Thanks, though.' (Thank you even though I can't allow you to help me, it still means a lot.)_

-ooo-

'Mary, there you are', Mrs Hudson started at once, 'we should talk, _later_.' She signalled the secrecy even though right behind her Greg was staring at Mrs Hudson in utter amusement. Mary came sit at the table, and John took the chance to hand her his toasts.

'How are you feeling today, John?' she cared, sweetly. He stiffed, due to the audience.

'All the better. Did you manage to sleep well?'

She nodded and then turn to Greg, in a silent demand to know what he was doing there.

Sherlock spoke first: 'Our friendly neighbourhood Scotland Yarder is here to give us access to an old abandoned ammunition storage bunker in the suburbs of London. That's where we believe the main bulk of the bullet structure that hit John came from.'

Greg looked over at Mary, concerned by the way the information had been delivered, only to find her very natural.

'I see, and who's going, you said?' she returned.

'Greg, John and I, obviously.'

'Sherlock, he was just shot, he mustn't go.'

'Mary!' John sounded embarrassed. 'I know I can do this, and I want to do this.'

'Sherlock...' she tried appealing to him directly. But his loyalty had to go to the long term friend and his own wish for company.

'You heard the doctor, Mary. I'll make sure he's returned to you with the same number of holes in him.' That time even John looked at him sideways.


	7. Chapter 7

-ooo-

The industrial thick concrete walls had a dark grey tinge to them, smeared with uneven patterns of mould and humidity spreading to the floor and ceiling. Sherlock, John and Greg descend a narrow claustrophobic corridor staircase that leads onto the main storage area. There's a railing by one side of the steps, but the narrowness of the corridor allows enough space for a person to outstretch their arms and reach either side of the walls, and it makes John wonder if it could only be there to ground the most affected by the sudden rise in the air pressure and humidity rate, to keep them from tumbling down the steps.

'This is the London that doesn't get shown to the tourists', Greg remarked, amused. 'On the other hand, they might actually enjoy it, the ones that pay to see the WWII bunkers...'

'Sherlock', John started slowly, looking all around, 'there doesn't seem to be a sign that someone has been here lately... Are you sure the bullets came from here?'

'Yes', and he reproached him with a look. John just trusted at once, he always did.

They finally reached a heavy bolted metal door at the end of the stairs. If they were expecting large key to match the lock on the vaulted door, there was none. Greg just twisted the knob and it opened. 'Some of my boys have been here already for the inventory.'

There was a small square room on the other side, filled with shelves from ceiling to floor with different sized crates. Some were already open, revealing rifles, guns, and ammunition. They looked at each other, worried. Police agents hadn't left it like that. The place had been accessed since.

'I may not be the only target of this sniper', said John out loud. Sherlock stared at him.

All of a sudden they heard a noise at the beginning of the stairs. Someone had come to the top, and hearing them, had set off. Both Sherlock and Greg lashed out running to the top, John followed them as best as he could, at a considerably lower speed.

'John, stay back!' he heard Sherlock shout. That made him just want to speed up, and he took his right hand to his pocket. The gun wasn't there. Sherlock had nicked it.

Sherlock lashed over the steps up to the entrance, coat flapping behind him, long strides of his legs that could hardly contain the restless energy within him. A fast motion at a distance alerted him that the man they were chasing was getting away through the main court yard of the abandoned factory. Greg called out 'Police!' and all of a sudden they couldn't see the intruder anymore, he must have hidden himself in that scenario.

A concrete paved patio where wild dry plants had come to nest, next to metal scrapes junk abandoned to rust. A lost gunshot was fired, halting Sherlock and Greg in their chase. The courtyard was a dangerous site, with plenty of places where a crouching man could hide with a gun and shoot back. They took cover themselves, close to one of the only erected brick walls left standing of the old factory.

'Do you see him, Sherlock?'

Sherlock shook his head, tense. 'Possibly _there_', he pointed at a distance corner, where one of the rubbish piles amounted higher. _There _and _there_, no. We would see his shadow, the sunlight is coming in directly from the east. And _there _we would have heard his steps on the gravel on arrival, which we did not.'

'You're sure about this?'

'Yes, I'm sure!' he replied impatient. Why express that doubt when in a few seconds he'd cave in and trust as always?

Finally the DI shouted out, in firm voice, across the patio: 'Police! Come out with your hands in the air!'

-ooo-

'Why would they still be here?' John wondered in a low voice as he hasted up the narrow steps. He wasn't talking to anyone in particular, they had all gone and left him behind. _Useless sidekick_ was his new category...

Why come back and why hide in the courtyard of the factory above? _It's a trap._ They want to get Sherlock Holmes... He grabbed his shoulder tighter and hurried up the last steps.

That was when he heard the first gun fire playing above. John came up to the metal door separating him from the outside in furtive steps...

-ooo-

'Come on out! Police!' Greg insisted, tense, holding his gun by his side. Next to him, Sherlock was engaged in firing a few lost rounds into the distance, shots with no particular aim, perhaps to force the uncomfortable situation.

'You do know there are only a few bullets inside the gun, do you?!' Greg complained loudly as he covered his ears from the unexpected noise of the blasts. 'Do you have extra bullets?' he insisted.

'Not here', he stated, wondering how John would answer the question when he finally arrived.

Their almost casual conversation was interrupted with new gun play. Sherlock frowned. They couldn't leave their hiding place and they didn't know how many bullets the other side still held. It was a standstill, one that the detective inspector would try to resolve in his own terms. He phoned for backup in a few short, concise words over his phone. Now the situation was on a deadline.

Sherlock turned abruptly to face behind him, and Greg would immediately notice the gesture. 'What?!' he pointed his gun to the door behind them. 'What did you hear?!'

'Nothing at all.'

'Nothing?!' he couldn't understand what was the importance of nothing.

'John should be here by now...' Greg immediately lowered his gun. They would cross gazes.

At the distance there was a sharp harsh sound, as if some of the metals in the scrap pile unravelled themselves, rolling over the concrete floor. Sherlock eyes widened as a response to his understanding.

'Hurry!' Sherlock demanded, getting upright to run and cross the yard. Still crouching, Greg managed to grab him and pull him back by force. He was trying to protect the man next to him from his own insanity.

'What the hell?!'

'It's John, he went around', Sherlock explained fiercely, and he set himself free. He ran over the open courtyard with all the confidence in his partner. Greg hesitated at first, but he couldn't abandon him. He ran after Sherlock, though with a much lesser degree of confidence that the situation was safe.

As they reached the pile of scrap opposite, guns in hand, all the courtyard was eerily silent. Still, they knew, the armed man hadn't left, he was still lurking in the shadows.

They found him unconscious on the floor, a loose board by his side, and John bending over him calmly, making sure his vitals were alright. He'd look up at once. 'Yeah, he's fine... So to speak... Missed you guys, hm, must have taken a wrong turn somewhere', he pretended.

Greg was already handcuffing the man and he looked over at Sherlock, and was still able to catch the glimpse of a smile that he'd hid until John was looking back at the fallen man. Those two were equally crazy. For a long time Greg thought Sherlock was the energetic maniac instigator and John just followed him around in his quiet controlled mood. Now he was beginning to wonder if sometimes it just wasn't the exact opposite... balancing them as equals.

The first siren noises became apparent from afar, at last. John would frown. That was new. Hanging around Greg had its perks, he supposed.

'And what was the point of all this, Sherlock?' he'd still press his friend, out of habit. He eagerly waited for the answer.

'They were two of them, this one stayed behind, to grant the other time to get away with something they couldn't afford to let us catch.'

'Two?' Greg doubted. 'How do you know there were two of them?'

'Well, it's obvious, isn't it?' he asked, exasperated. 'The fresh muddy footprints of two people on that corner of the yard! And you call yourself Detective Inspector?! Besides, there was no reason for one to stay behind firing random shots on to our direction unless he had an accomplice trying to enter the bunker behind us, or trying to take _something _away from us without getting caught.'

'Take what?' Greg insisted.

'I don't know', he confessed, exasperated, taking his hands to his head. Then he focused his gaze on John. 'There will be a next one. I don't know who or when, but there will be another hit.'

John was looking back at him, heavily. Greg broke apart from the two of them to talk to the first officers on arrival.

'Sherlock', John would state, sternly, marking every word very clearly, 'we need to stop that from happening.'

'You won't be shot again, John', he promised, quietly restrained.

John was taken aback for a second. 'That's not what I meant. Somewhere out there, some victim is about to get shot, for god knows for what reason. You need to figure this out, so we can stop it... For all we know they might try to get _you_ next.'

'Unlikely.'

'Why?!' John was frustrated with the mechanical emotionless answers Sherlock provided.

'Because they missed a perfectly good shot the night they shot you, John.'

John dropped his gaze, stunned, and Sherlock took the chance to step forward and exit the conversation.


	8. Chapter 8

-ooo-

'And John? Is John with you?' It wasn't the first time Mary pronounced those exact words to Sherlock, and yet how far ago it had been. Just before he had found out her secret, the one she had fought with all her might to keep from John, she believed he could never accept it. But John had, in the end. Accepted she had a violent past, one she had consciously chosen to leave behind her. Most people wouldn't have found the strength to do that, but she had, and John had found in him the admiration for her decision, fuelling his respect for her despite the deceptiveness.

'He's just back at Baker Street. He needs some rest', Sherlock answered truthfully. Mary looked behind him, to the window of that darkened empty flat, just across the street from Sherlock's place. He'd be the first to talk again: 'I calculated you'd come here, to see the place where the bullet was fired from. I gave you enough time to come here and back before John noticed it.'

She faked a brief smile. 'You pack terribly, Sherlock. I went home first, to make a real overnight bag. John is insisting to stick around. I'll let him do that for now.' But it weren't just clothes she had fetched, and he probably knew it. It was something entirely different, something Molly could not know about.

'You know he'd be worried that you'd go alone, Mary.'

'That's why you won't tell him where I went, Sherlock, you don't want to see him worrying like that.'

'You're calculating and cold, Mary Morstan Watson.'

'So are you, Sherlock Holmes. That's how we get along so well. We understand each other. You knew I'd go home and the danger in that was frankly minimal. You also knew I'd come here to check the shot on my own. You didn't come here to get me. You came here to hear me analyse the shot. You don't want to ask John to come here and do it himself, out of commiseration. He knows how to fire a few rounds as well. But I can do that analysis for you. I can stand here and observe John as he walks around 221B. I can take my gun...' and she did, raising it up at arm's length, locking the aim on John Watson, and calculating the trajectory to the apartment across and its occupant. 'I can tell you if it really was a crack shot.'

Sherlock turned away, disengaged. 'Now it's too late. John's there.' He faced her again. 'I'd like to have seen you try the shot. Was this your kind of a shot, Mary?'

She lowered the gun she had been pointing at her husband across the street. With a shoulder shrug she noticed: 'It's an easy enough shot with a rifle, Sherlock. The glass would cause some distortion, but not enough to significantly alter the bullet's direction after it... Does it bother you that I could take such a shot with a rifle, Sherlock?'

He hinted a smile, but she'd misunderstand it. She thought it was a compliment. But actually he had remembered another shot. A more difficult one. John had done that shot with a pistol, over two window panes, from across a similar distance, to protect him, Sherlock, they had just recently met. Mary had no real notion of John's capabilities under pressure because he wasn't the boasting type. That remained a secret only between the two of them.

Sherlock turned around to return, but he'd halt for one last question: 'Who'd you shot next, Mary?'

She pondered the question with no surprise. 'You, Sherlock. You're next.'

'Me', he repeated.

'The shooter was testing the method, Sherlock. Not the window and the view. He was testing the recipe for the bullet's coating. You know that. You don't need to hear me say it. You're the great Sherlock Holmes, you've figured that out a long time ago. Even John as probably figured it out even if he won't tell you. That's why he's not leaving you, that's why he insists in staying at Baker Street.'

They both looked over at the window. The empty flat in which they stood was dark and that's why they could easily see the lit interiors of Baker Street while John paced around worryingly, but he couldn't see them back.

'But you see now I know how he cooks up the bullet's casing, Mary. Now it can be fought from the start by a doctor.'

'If they also aim at your shoulder, Sherlock, and why would they do that when they could easily aim at your heart and let the poison be the security clause on your death?... Sherlock, whoever he is, he's pissed off with you. He's targeting you slowly, deliberately, making you suffer before the kill shot.'

He smiled coldly. 'That's his mistake. You should never mix revenge with emotion.'

She halted him before he'd leave the flat. 'Whatever you done to generate this anger, it was big. This is not a random hit, and this is not a bounty hunter. This is a signature move. The person after you, Sherlock, is doing this himself. He's always controlling the whole operation.'

Sherlock nodded slowly. 'I'll leave first, you leave in ten minutes time, so John doesn't suspect.'


	9. Chapter 9

-ooo-

'You didn't get the milk', John expressed bitterly. 'You went out to get the milk, and as ever, no milk! You never intended to get the milk! What are you not telling me, Sherlock? Why are you leaving me out of it? Is it because I got shot? Because somehow I let myself get shot you won't trust me the same?'

He was angry, his friend knew that perfectly well. For the sake of peace and quiet, Sherlock was sitting very still in his chair, with a pondering attitude, as John talked it out, he must have known it was perfectly useless. Anyway, John was incapable of expressing the real reason for his anger. It was never about the milk. He hardly ever took milk. He was possibly mildly lactose-intolerant. Further observing would be necessary to assess that theory.

'Well, I'm back now', Sherlock said at last, getting up in a burst of energy and heading towards the papers on his desk. John just sighed, somehow reaching a low point in energy, or finally letting it go.

'Did you get something important - from wherever you went? - and I'm not talking about groceries now.'

'We should go check on Scotland Yard, see what they have on the guy you nailed with a plank.'

There was a hint of an evil grin in John, the armed guy hadn't seen it coming... 'Fine, let me just get my coat...'

He went to grab his coat. Behind him, Sherlock was already racing down the steps to the front door. All John could do was hurry behind him as best as he could.

'Sherlock!' he protested as Sherlock was about to close shut a cab door without him. He seemed to have missed the fact that John was still far behind, so immersed in his reasoning. He reopened the door wide to let him in. John wanted to protest. He couldn't run, he physically couldn't run, and that was bothering him more than it'd ever bother Sherlock to wait two seconds for him to catch up. But John didn't say a word. After all, the man sitting next to him was the only consulting detective in the world, he should figure out on his own (eventually) that John wasn't being exactly lazy for idleness sake.

John sat back against the cab upholsters as it took off. He could see Sherlock was in one off his silent sulky moods, there was hardly a point in trying to talk him out of it. He closed his eyes for a second, trying to disguise the intense deep pain flash that intermittently erupted from his shoulder.

Sherlock had a glance of concern over John, sitting very stiff by his side on the cab. Mary had stayed behind. Maybe devising some personal plan, again. Mary didn't play well in a team, she had been trained that way, she couldn't help it. She wouldn't let go of the chance to exercise revenge on the shooter, if she came across him first. But that was something she couldn't let John know. John was getting convinced she was abandoning it all for him, for their future together, for the plans to have children and lead boring lives together. As much as they wished such a future together, it was in neither of their natures. They wouldn't bear to lead those plain boring lives they were building. Mary had come to find that out, and was coming to terms with it. John still couldn't face it. That the man he was when he relocated abroad to a war scenario was still the same man that solved national security calibre puzzles by the consulting detective's side. So Mary had come to hide it from him. Slowly, the small lies were starting to pile up into bigger ones. Somewhere in London, the woman currently known as Mary Watson was leading a silent double life, not much different from the one her husband was exploring at the moment. The only difference was that she accepted his need for danger and let him do it openly, and he'd be too much disrupted by hers to let her off like that. He'd feel the urge to protect her and keep her safe more than anything else.

_Just look at him now, following Sherlock around because he wanted to keep his friend safe._ He couldn't be with the both of them, and believing Mary to be playing the safe game, he had come along with his friend. Like old times, John had always taken to himself the role of the protector. It was his nature. But this time there was another part of his nature that was failing him. His body was collapsing under the combined effort of the activity in the last hours. He was visibly exhausted, sleep deprived and starved. He wouldn't stop while Sherlock didn't stop as well, he wouldn't sleep until the danger had lessened (and John had the medical core and army training to withstand up to days awake with small pauses like that one), and he couldn't care to eat and trigger the secondary effects of the demanding medication that had been instilled in him at the Hospital. There was a blind allegiance in John Watson's personality, but a very strong minded one at it. One that continuously baffled Sherlock Holmes, because he couldn't really understand it rationally, and he really didn't feel worthy of it for the most part. To John, and in spite all that Sherlock himself had told him harshly, Sherlock was a hero. Not just a heroic person, but a hero in his nature. Well, John was wrong, Sherlock was sure. And though to keep John around was unfair to his loyalty and care for Sherlock, the detective had come to rely on him, to need him more and more, in a semblance of true care, one that Sherlock didn't believe himself capable off, but that John could have sworn was in him from the start.

In under twenty minutes through London's traffic, they arrived at Scotland Yard.

Bored. Sherlock Holmes was now bored. The exhilarating chase for a mysterious shooter had shrivelled down to a senseless waiting game. Now that the adrenaline came crashing down, it made it all unbearably dull. They were all in danger, fatigued from chasing weak leads and no closer to the resolution of the case then before.

Sherlock and John walked the hallways to meet DI Lestrade. Some faces, not many, turned to gaze at them as they passed. Fame, that's what it was. Especially after the mysterious fake fall of a rooftop that had been a reality for two years straight.

'John, you look like hell', Greg was explicit, as he took a step back to let them cross his office door.

'It's a new look I'm going for', he replied at once, stiffing and straightening himself.

Greg tried to talk directly at John and to him alone: 'Look, I'm not a doctor, but you need to...'

He'd cut him off: 'I am. I'm a doctor.' There was defiance in his eyes, yet his overall expression was as innocent as controlled.

Greg looked from John to Sherlock, who was already peacefully taking a seat by the desk. Greg made sure to do what Sherlock had failed to do and pulled a chair out for John before circling his desk. Military John only took his seat after the detective inspector did. It wasn't the first time. It was something that distracted John did, when caught off guard, a trained behaviour of supposed recognition of authority that took over like a second nature. John was at Scotland Yard premises, he'd sit when told to sit or after the representative had sat. By his side, Sherlock was melting away in his chair, in a strong dominant presence on the office.

'You two are here because of that man this morning. I could have saved you the trip here. He's not doing much talking. In fact, he won't be doing much talking for a while. He had to be rushed to the Hospital. One of my men realized he wasn't doing well. We're not doctors here, _John_, but we could tell he had been poisoned...'

'Interesting', said Sherlock. 'Same thing as John?'

John dismissed briefly: 'Probably still running the tests, they can't tell just yet... Why poison him?' he asked out loud as usual.

'You already know why, John.'

John nodded slowly. 'So he wouldn't provide us with information if he got caught.'

'And again, so the second man could escape. Greg, run his name against the international data base. I think you'll find that he's our shooter.'

'What?!' they both asked at once.

'The second man is the one that ordered the hit. He's tying loose ends. He's cleaning up before he makes his last move.'

'Sherlock!' Greg was exasperated. 'If there's something you're not telling us...'

John went further along, more calmly: 'You think there's only one more shooting, one last shooting, you've just said it yourself', he anticipated the reproach Sherlock was about to fake to keep him in the dark. 'If the mastermind has severed ties with the shooter, then he'll have to find himself another shooter...'

'Unlikely.'

'Or he'll have to shoot himself. If he went about hiring someone in the first place he mustn't be that much of a shooter himself. So he'll have to find an easy clean opportunity for the last shot. An easy target, in an open area.'

Greg added: 'Actually, even if he misses...'

'The bullet's coating...' John understood. All along Sherlock seemed miles away in his mind.

'Instead of narrowing down the suspects, we've just opened the list to just about anyone, really.'

'And the fingerprints in the bunker, the car tires analysis on the factory, all those things?'

'Nothing came up yet, I'll keep you guys posted.'

John felt drained. Racing against time and always just slightly out of reach.

Sherlock glanced at him - that must be a record time for not pressing him for answers - before casually noticing: 'What if John wasn't the first?' Both man stared at him without saying a word.

Greg assured them: 'We haven't got unsolved hits like that, Sherlock, I checked.'

'None with that poison, sure, but what if no one noticed the poison and the victim died due to unclear complications? I'll need to ask Molly to have a look in the morgues as well.'

John closed his eyes and lowered his head to his chest for a second, saying: 'And me, I'll have a look at the files as well', he volunteered.

'John?!' Greg called him, circling his desk.

'He's fine (!)', Sherlock assured the detective inspector, leaning over his friend and unbuttoning his shirt to have a look at the bandages on the shoulder. John pushed him away violently, recovering from the weakness with a black humorous mood.

'Not dying this time around, Sherlock, no need to play the hero.'

There was a perceptible flash of hurt in the other's eyes, as he got back.

'Well, then, St. Bart's now. Will you come, John?' Sherlock asked, expressionless.

'Couldn't keep me out if you tried', he challenged, cold.

Behind them, Greg was looking very concerned.


	10. Chapter 10

-ooo-

St. Bart's exterior of cold heavy stone masked the white clean laboratory behind a couple of narrow windows. Molly Hooper is expecting them, already, and seems unsurprised when Sherlock and John enter. She lowers the deep green aqueous solution in her hand and faces them at once. She's about to say something but as her gaze passes over John she remains quiet instead.

'So, you're investigating away', she starts, stumbling a bit, leading Sherlock into the conversation. John remains behind, by the door, standing tall, following the conversation of the two lab genius with interest. 'What do you need, Sherlock?'

'Access to all of the records in the last month. We need to go through every single one of them. The answer has to be there, it has to be...'

'Feel free to use the computer by the window', she directed him.

Behind them, John coughed slightly. 'Actually, if you have another computer, I might be able to help.'

'Are you sure?' she asked him, taken aback. Wasn't that weird? To investigate killings that mimic what his own shooting almost was?

'Quite sure', he insisted, controlled, as Sherlock already took a seat in front of the computer. John looked over at him in a casual gesture and then he saw it. This time he saw it. This time he knew what to look for, to be fair. He saw the feeble movement of a rifle from the apartments across the street, and he didn't doubt for a second that he could already be too late. 'Sherlock!' He hit Molly with his arm to throw her to the floor where she'd be safe as he ran the distance between them him and Sherlock in two huge steps. In a desperate move he threw himself over his friend, to knock him out of the firing line. They both hit the floor as the window smashed to pieces over them, splashing shards of glass over them. Sherlock felt the pain of the blow as his head hit the ground with violence. Confused by the blow, he'd look around the room, everything was fuzzy and a loud ringing echoed in his hears. 'John? Molly?' he murmured at once, as he regained sense of what was happening.

Molly had crawled closer to the door and was sounding the fire alarm, the best way she had to attract immediate attention from security. She seemed completely unharmed. And John? He looked down on John by his side. No, please not again. Not so soon, not in the same way...

John was alright. He was trying to get himself seated upright as he grabbed Sherlock by the collar of his shirt, pulling him down, away from the visibility range from outside the shattered window. All the while, Sherlock was already securing him against the set of drawers under the desk, he was blacking out, but he wouldn't let go of his friend.

-ooo-

'They knew where to find you, Sherlock', Mary pointed out, in a cold reasoning, and almost a taunting voice.

'Well, St. Bart's is my home away from home. It's where I get the materials for my experiments, it's where...' (It's where I started my career and where I met John, and Molly and Greg.) 'John said that. Said he had just made up his mind on coming here the night he was shot. And I had just decided on going to Molly when I was almost shot.'

'It's not just the location, though, is it, Sherlock? If you didn't have a lousier shooter this time around...'

'You think he was going to miss the shot?!' Sherlock misunderstood.

'No, I think he took too long to take it. It's not like in the movies, Sherlock. The shooter doesn't stand around aiming until the velocity of the wind is just perfect and the light of the sun is angled right. They take the shot and leave in seconds, they can't stick around like that. Your shooter, unlike John's, just isn't an expert. He took too long. And John spotted him', Mary told him.

(He saved my life.) Sherlock shrugged his shoulders. 'Maybe John is not so clueless as I thought him to be. At least sometimes.'

Neither of them smiled. Not anymore. Sherlock and Mary didn't smile at each other when they talked. They'd sit almost expressionless in the room for the whole time. Unless someone was there. Usually John. Then they'd engage in the usual social conventions. But just when the two of them were together, they didn't feel the need to do that. They were both cold reasoning machines in each other's eyes and they understood themselves that way. How much of a contrast they were from the people crossing those hallways. The nurses, hurrying on doctors orders, the patients' families, scurrying along with raw emotions. As Sherlock and Mary sat outside the private room where John had been admitted half an hour ago, they stood as solid rocks among the senseless pain around them.

A male nurse exited the room with a few sample bottles full of blood for testing. Sherlock could have told them it was useless. John had collapsed under the strain of constantly saving him, that was his sole problem, he was far too generous. What they were doing to John now, poking him for samples, and drugging him to submission in a Hospital bed, draining the action of the military doctor, it was all because Sherlock himself wasn't capable of admitting his part, his guilt in the situation, and he was allowing it to happen with his silence...

'Sherlock?' Mary called him. 'You're not going soft on me now, are you?'

He straightened himself up a bit. 'Don't know what you mean', he deflected, looking down on her. She'd still bring a hand into his arm as a comfort gesture. He covered hers with his, trying to comfort her back as well. (John had done that to them both, he had changed them, made them painfully human.)

-ooo-

Sherlock left the Hospital through the front door. As he wrapped up tighter in his coat, he noticed the fleeting concealed motion of one of Mycroft's men, ordered to shadow him and keep him safe. John had been utterly oblivious to the fact that this had been going on for the past days, ever since John was unexpectedly shot. Maybe Sherlock should have told John. So John would worry less. But then again, John would certainly worry more, seeing that he wasn't the only one deeply concerned for Sherlock's safety.

A cab pulled over by his side without him even having to hail it. Another offer from Mycroft, aiming at making his big brother's work easier. Sherlock took it with no complaints.

'221B Baker Street.' The cab took off, rolling swiftly through London's streets.

Mary had stayed behind, in the Hospital, by her husband's side. Only her. John would be pissed, truly pissed, when he woke up, the next day. Even John knew how useless visitors were in those situations. No, he'd be pissed because Sherlock had gone out alone.

He was just going home. Mycroft's men had been there to make sure it was perfectly safe for him to return.

The cab parked by the front door. Sherlock payed the sum. Home. It felt cold. Mrs Hudson was out, and the lights were off behind the window piece on top of the door.

He'd be alone at last, and alone was a relief for Sherlock right then. All those pokes and holes on John were still fresh on his mind, and it was becoming harder to conceal it, that flaw,_ that he felt the pain for someone else_. That was no good. It made him a crap investigator. Maybe he just needed to let go of the investigation until the next day. Just for a few hours.

It wasn't just John who was stone cold out for the rest of the day. Sherlock felt very much the same on his own way.

Sherlock took the gloves off and threw them on the kitchen table as he entered the flat. Only then he noticed Mycroft had given instructions to leave the window blinds closed. He smirked. _Don't make it easier on the shooter, Sherlock_, he could have translated. Fine. He'd keep them closed... for now.

Sherlock flipped the switch and the lights came on. All was the same, the clutter, the papers, John's chair, John's blood on the floor boards. All he could do was to take a seat on his chair, get his fingertips together, and try thinking... He kept failing, and opening his eyes. John's empty chair in front of him. He used it to motivate him, every time. But all the times he started thinking of the facts, he hit a stone wall. The visual of John's body going limp on his arms. No, it was_ for John_. Not about him. He had to focus harder. The hits, it was about the hits. It was him and John, the targets. The coated bullet was the chosen means. Unusual, extravagant even. Not the easiest way. Mary had said he had pissed off the shooter. It was personal. But not just Sherlock, John also. The proof of it was that even though John's murder hadn't been successful, the mastermind had moved on to the next target: Sherlock. The both of them. There were lots of enemies to chose from, lots of pissed off foes in the shadows. How could he narrow it down? Just focusing. There had to be enough clues already for him to solve the puzzle. Only then could he really rest.

The abandoned factory had been the depository for old ammunition from the end of World War Two. Could there be a meaning to its choice or was it the result of a stroke of luck? Either way, it was a signature, once again, extravagant. The mastermind was vain, he wanted to publicize himself. The one who defeated the great hat detective and his partner. He could see the papers already: _Sherlock Holmes got beat at last_. Actually, it's probably something more on the lines of: _Internet detective hit gets hit_. There were no good writers left among journalists...

John, oh, John, what had you done? You had said Yes to coming spend a night in Baker Street, a replay of old times, and all had gone astray... You were probably sorry you agreed now...

Sherlock lowered his eyes to the small chest by the window. He wondered what Mycroft would say about it...

-ooo-

The patient and his visitor were both deep asleep. Side by side, one on the bed, hooked up to some medical devices, and the other leaning from a chair towards the bed, resting her head in his pillow, straining herself to feel his warmth and his security.

John's breathing was drugged and heavy, unnatural even, and the expression in his face had something to it of a lost person. It was unfiltered, sincere, unbound by social conventions and affectionate white lies. John couldn't hide it this time, because his body betrayed his heart. Both exhaustion and the truth had taken over his facial expression, and it could be read with ease this time. John was on the verge of a physical collapse and emotional meltdown. Taunted, haggard, that was how his expression read now, in the most honest display, a sheer contrast to the rock solid soldier that he took pride in exhibiting to the world.

Leaning from the chair, Mary was sleeping more lightly, in a vigilant state, her face turned towards his but her eyes closed. She wasn't aware of his expression and his inner struggle, she didn't catch a glimpse of his truth, because she had closed her eyes. She must have figured it out in some level, however, as even in her sleep she had her hand resting and comforting his hand where the IV filtered in a constant drip of medication.

There was one more person in the room. A young European doctor, ginger haired, analyzing the patient's charts with a keen eye, through his reading glasses. That would be, at least, the first impression of the man. Perhaps it would take Sherlock Holmes himself to notice the lack of graduation in his glasses, or that the man's shoulders stood too straight for the average medical school undergraduate. A second look, more accessible to the common person, might bring to light that the badge on the white coat was not a match to the person wearing it. Both ginger heads, but different features. And again, the average person might have recognized the ginger impersonator's features as similar to those of a more famous individual, one that divided public opinion sometimes, but undoubtedly called in the attention under the unordinary name of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock would remain thus unseen till the early hours of the morning, doing relatively little to no work at all, shuffling patient files on his hands whenever other service providers crossed the hall or came by the door. All the while, John and Mary slept by each other's side, unaware of the caring vigilance. Worthless, for sure, as Mycroft had had his hand on them as well, but still the only action that seemed to set Sherlock at ease that night.

Mary would be the first to wake up. It happened to be at the time a ginger doctor was exiting the room. She concluded that it had been something the doctor had done that had awoken her. John, in his turn, was still completely out. He hadn't stirred the whole night, apparently. The medication he had been induced on had been severe and there seemed to be a restlessness in his expression that proved he had been fighting it every inch of the way. Slowly it was wearing off.

* * *

_A/N: Oh boy, what was I thinking? I was under post-flu blues when I wrote this. Yes, there's a plot reason. If it helps: I haven't had another flu since (*wink*). This is one of two chapters that had me almost giving up on posting this story at all. __Please don't hate me. __-__csf_


	11. Chapter 11

-ooo-

'Sherlock?'

Greg again. This time he wouldn't even wait for Sherlock to drop at Scotland Yard. This time he came directly to Baker Street.

'In the kitchen, making coffee, slept fine, no new leads of yet, I heard John is doing okay, no news on yesterday's shooter - how about you?'

Greg paused for two seconds, that was as annoying as it got. He still stepped forward, towards the detective.

'Look, Sherlock, I didn't come here to mess with... whatever you do in your mornings, okay? John called me. He's up already and he was worried about you. Made me promise I'd come and see you...'

'You can tell him I haven't been shot overnight, that should be of comfort to him...'

Greg frowned, and pointing at him accusingly said: 'You two are more alike than you know, you and John...'

Sherlock dismissed at once. 'No, I'm quite sure we couldn't be more different. His thought process is all... scattered. Mine has been trained to be clean, neat, efficient.'

'Yeah, thought process, that's how I usually compare people, right?' his sarcasm was lost on the other man. 'Look, what happened yesterday with Molly...'

'She's okay too', Sherlock dismissed at once, abrasive.

'I know she's okay, I've been to see her. What I was going to say is that it's escalating, Sherlock, this man is losing control.'

'That's actually a good thing the way I see it.' His eyes were shining. It was all about the case again. His focus was back.

'Fine, whatever, but I'm not so concerned on the case, right now. I'm concerned about _you_. If you could do us all a favour and just stay here, stay back, until we catch that guy. Running around trying to keep you protected isn't going to help me catch the person behind this...'

Sherlock frowned. 'It's not your job to catch him. It's mine.'

'I'm the police, Sherlock. Not you.'

'He shot John in cold blood. Believe me, nothing will stop me from getting to him first.'

'Do I need to detain you for questioning in regard to yesterday's shooting?'

'What? I was the victim!'

'Well, I must have misunderstood it and I must think the victim intended was John and that you acted suspiciously so I'll have to question you the whole day long. And Molly will back me up as long as I tell her it's to keep you safe.'

'Molly? Well, John would never go in for that sort of thing!' he was childishly stubborn.

'Too bad I won't be able to question him at the Yard and hear his side till the Yard's doctor clears his health bill...'

'And they let you wear a badge?!'

'Perhaps I should wear a medal.'

Sherlock took a deep breath. Greg took the opportunity to hammer it in. 'I'll let you do your own thing as long as you don't go around taking useless risks, Sherlock. There's no glory in solving the case if it gets you or John killed... I'm off, I need to get to work. Stop sulking and hear me out this time, will you? And take some care of John, he's on his way back here, with Mary.' He nodded off a goodbye and left, crossing paths with Mrs Hudson on the stairs.

She'd come up next, much to Sherlock's dismay.

'Oh, did I hear it right? Is John coming back, so soon? That must mean it wasn't serious at all this time, right?... Oh, you look tired, dear, I'll get your coffee going, that'll make you feel all better.'

Sherlock remained motionless as she started preparing coffee, not surprised at all he'd just stand there, in all the wrong places for her to get the coffee done. 'Mrs Hudson, why did they shoot John Watson?' he asked in a whisper. More than a question to her, he was thinking out loud. Something wasn't right. He needed to go back to the basics.

She stopped at once when she heard the question, her face let go of the polite mother act and just looked pained. 'It's so sad, isn't it? Someone wanting to hurt our John. He must be an evil man. And he doesn't know our John, or he'd never do that, would he? John is a tad uptight but he has a great heart, everyone knows that.' She shook her head in sadness. 'First in the war, so far away from his family. It must have been so terrible, I can only imagine. John never talks about it, that's how hard it was for him. And now this time, and in here!, of all places. At least now he has Mary with him, he's not so alone. If it were up to that sister he has... He'd still be as alone as he was in the war. Family should stick together, she should know better...'

Sherlock sighed. No, Mrs Hudson wouldn't do. She was leaving him the more confused with her ramblings about John's sweetness. (That just went to show that she had never shared an apartment with a neat freak, he had ruined a lot of his human body parts experiments with his sole preoccupation with health hazards.)

'John's coming here, with Mary', he deviated the conversation. Mrs Hudson smiled, she liked Mary, the Mary that Mary was to everyone else at least.

'Oh, it must be so scary for Mary, poor girl. I'll make her a nice cup of tea when she gets here. My mother always said that a nice cup always fixes away the troubles. Well, not all, but some anyway. My mother wasn't always right. She drank too much, and I don't mean tea...' she let out in a confidence whisper.

Sherlock stammered, trying to collect his thoughts: 'I'd hold that story. Mary doesn't have a mother, I think. She's an orphan', at least that was the official version. Who knew the whole truth?

'Oh, that's sad. Well, John can relate to that.'

'What do you mean?' he was sincerely confused. Something, there was something evident, hiding in Sherlock's mind.

'Honestly, Sherlock, it's not even 9 o'clock yet. I don't know what you were up to, dear, but it must have melted your brain. You weren't drinking, were you? You better not even tell me, just drink your coffee, that'll help.'

He faced her with surprise. 'Mrs Hudson, you might be a genius too. I thought there'd be two shootings, I was wrong. _There are three planned._ It's been the plan all along.'

'But who else, dear?'

He wouldn't answer for they were interrupted by the sound of keys on the front door, downstairs. 'John and Mary, they're here.'

Mrs Hudson went to the landing at once to great the newcomers. 'Mary... And John! How are you two feeling today?'

'We're okay, we really are', Mary told her.

Sherlock came to the kitchen door, he needed to get Mary's sole attention.


	12. Chapter 12

'Mary, I found that glove you misplaced the other day', Sherlock announced. As he expected she played along instantly. And John didn't even bother to notice that there had been no gloves missing. Mrs Hudson was insisting that John took a seat in his chair, by the fireplace, and Mary slipped into the kitchen with a kind smile still lingering in her lips.

'What is it, Sherlock?' Then her face grew colder, it was just the two of them talking anyway.

'Mary, we can't talk here, but you should know, I'm not the last target. _You are. _This has all been about you. John, me. They are actually circling you, Mary. Someone from your past. Someone _you_ pissed off.'

'Oh, I see', she said, turning to glance at John. Of course that given that ultimatum style of deduction she'd look to her priority. Fire always seemed to draw people into safeguarding their priorities. Sherlock expected nothing less. He had no doubt of the raw strong love she felt for the man sitting on his armchair with his back to her. Oh, but Mary was someone apart from the majority, John had chosen wisely, based only on his instinct. She cared very much about him, she didn't want to see him hurt in the process. But it was more than that. She knew the convenient way out of that dangerous situation was to leave at once. To secretively abandon London and go on the run till the shooter got caught. Painfully enough, she wouldn't be able to do so with John by her side, she wouldn't have enough mobility with an unhealthy man tagging along. That was going to break John's heart, but in order to keep her safe, he'd stoically take that blow, both Mary and Sherlock knew so. The way Sherlock saw it, she'd have to trust him to help her out, from a distance, as he also took care of keeping John safe. It was their collective best option.

Somehow, Sherlock understood only then, as the silent seconds dragged by, that he had misread Mary's final choice. She wasn't going to exit London to keep herself and them safe. She had just made up her mind of two things: of _not telling John she was the main target all along_, and of _not leaving the one she loved the most_. And Sherlock just sighed. Love and women. Why did they always conspire to make things the more difficult for him? Even John's unfounded need to be overgenerous and abnegated was more natural than that clinging possessive love Mary kept showing... If it were the other way around, would have John left Mary behind, in the hope that the whole situation could get fixed soon, with no one getting hurt? He'd be out the door before Sherlock could finish talking. And he'd also go blundering round the city making noise and attracting attention so to make sure he was the sole target, thus keeping them safe. Well, that wasn't much better, was it? (John and Mary had a knack for reminding him why he was better off when he didn't have friends...)

'Mary...' he started, but she cut him off.

'John won't know that. You won't tell him.'

'Is that a threat?' he dramatized.

'John's in danger, I'd never leave him, and he'd never leave me.'

'You need to take precautions, Mary.' And so needed John. But then again, that had been obvious for John from the moment he had been shot. At that point, Sherlock was trying to insist that Mary took care. How could he protect all of them at the same time when neither of them actually listened and did what he told them to? Mary wouldn't take cover, John insisted on tagging along on every simple cab ride. If they would just listen to him for a second...

Mrs Hudson called on Mary to take her downstairs for whatever reason. Sherlock returned to the living room as John was leaving it. He'd state calmly recognising his friend's presence:

'I'm just going to catch on some sleep for a couple of hours, Sherlock. Anything you need, please just don't go off on your own, you've got Mary. She's possibly the most perfect partner you'll ever need on the scene, to be honest, and she's quite willing to help you.'

Sherlock frowned slightly. 'What do you mean, _the perfect partner_?!'

'She's married to me, obviously I don't mean it like that.' He rubbed his fingers over his closed eyes for a second.' You know what I mean, you two are incredibly alike. It's like I found a way to marry you as a woman, that's how weird it is some times. Her past, the one you found out, makes her a lot like you. It's not even funny that it had to be you to find that out...'

He's reasoning was again bouncing off the walls and darting in every direction, Sherlock noticed. 'It kind of happened that way, it wasn't on purpose...'

But John was rambling, in lost steps around the living room. Sherlock stood there, very quiet, trying to understand, not sure what to say. 'You two even think alike', he started over. 'Results over emotions. It doesn't really matter who you hurt on the process, it's all about the bottom line, about getting the job done. I accepted that on you, Sherlock, with great difficulty. Every now and then I saw a glimpse of the warm heart under the cold mask, and I knew a great brain lay there as well, and I welcomed the chance to help you.' He shook his head, feverishly. 'Now, Mary was sweet and kind, and she needed me, my help, and I could help her, and I felt that connection. It turns out it was based on lies, and I can't even know what was true anymore.'

'She loves you, you know that', his friend said quietly.

'So you both keep saying. But if that's true, then why is she hiding things from me again? She went back for her gun. I didn't even know she had a gun. Why does she need a gun. Why is she lying to me again? Why don't any of you two trust me?'

'Come on, John, that's not fair.'

His voice dropped to a quiet despair. 'She's still lying to me. She doesn't trust me. You never really trusted me either, you always preferred to keep me in the dark... And I don't know why I am complaining.' He shrugged his shoulders. (Probably that hurt, but he showed no signs, numb.) 'You two are right. I'm the odd one out. Maybe you two should pair up. Because I'll always worry about the two of you. Maybe together is safer for the two of you...' he finally turned to leave.

At last Sherlock stirred from his immobility. 'John!'

'I'm just going to lie down for a second, don't worry about me. Actually, you never do, my bad. I'm just another one of your clients, now. And it's lucky Mrs H knows me and allows me to crash on the bedroom upstairs...'

'John!' But he wouldn't stop or turn this time. He didn't see his friend worried and understanding look. He'd never see that he had hurt him with his words either.

Most of the cases Sherlock had solved, he had solved because of John. He was the human connection, the empathy, the reason why the cases were no longer just mental puzzles for Sherlock but actually meant something. Sherlock used to feel an exhilarating rush solving the puzzles and an utter boredom for the most part when delivering the solution. John's genuine reactions had changed that, had given him pride in his success, and empathy, because John smiled also because he was happy for the clients.

Mary couldn't be John. Yes, she was more analytic and cold reasoning, but definitely not reliable and steady. Her motivations were very different too.

How had John come to think of Mary in those terms? There was much less love between them now but John still held on firmly and refused to discuss it. He'd always do the right thing and he wouldn't walk out. That had been an unburdening speech out of exhaustion and hurt, and John was unlikely to ever repeat it. He'd carry on being the perfect husband to a wife with which he related less. Those two were inefficient communicators, to say the least. By the next morning, John Watson would have internalized his feelings and carry on like all was the same. Sherlock had seen that happen before, usually accompanied with more twitches in the left hand. At the time Sherlock had brushed it off. John was a tough guy, he could take it, he had thought. So what had changed in the mean time? He had found out that John was even tougher than he thought. He really could take it, and he always bounced back to that inner confidence of himself and the world around him. Unfortunately, Sherlock now saw that it hadn't always been that simple. John had carried on, but must have been feeling very alone, silently alone. For some reason, Sherlock could see and feel it now. He probably never had felt it before, _his friend's pain, like his own_. How had John come to believe that feeling pain for other people was a good thing? He tried to brush it off, like he did before, but somehow now he couldn't anymore. His proximity to John had changed him. Too bad John couldn't see it. Then he'd see his importance and maybe he'd feel a bit better...

-ooo-

'Your turn, Mycroft.'

'You never wanted this sort of information before, but you want it now. What changed?' he inquired, sternly, as he placed a game piece over the structure already created, in a precarious equilibrium over the coffee table at Baker Street. 'Your turn, Sherlock.'

'Who says anything has changed?'

The older brother raised a brow but let it pass. 'Fine, you won't tell me. Should I start to worry about Mary Watson? You always chose the most curious friends...'

'Not like that, Mycroft, your turn.'

'Yes, of course, it was John who chose her, in the first place. And how is our brave soldier?' there was superiority in his words, not a real compliment. The structure of wooden pieces between them crumbled over the brown paper file that Mycroft had brought Sherlock.

'Braving along as always, I'd imagine', Sherlock minimized. 'Is that everything you got?' (All the information your secret services can gather, all the care you can demonstrate for the man who has kept me safe for the last years.)

Mycroft frowned, looking at his brother. 'You'll find that it's plenty. Will I need to remind you that this information cannot be shared, Sherlock? You won't let sentiment force you into making the bad decision of sharing this information?'

(John, he meant tell John all that Mycroft had dug on his wife.) 'Definitely not. Are you _caring_, Mycroft?' He frowned heavily on his older brother.

'Just because I know things, doesn't mean I get involved. I must stay above it all, Sherlock. I'm letting you in on this one out of consideration. In that sense perhaps I do care about John Watson more than you think.'

'You're going soft with age.' There was brotherly glee on Sherlock's eyes, one that got reflected for an instant in Mycroft's eyes.

'You should take care, it might come to you as well.'

The two brothers parted, with Mycroft leaving Baker Street. If he really noticed the red stained floor boards by the right of the living room door, he ignored their presence cold-heartedly. He'd step on them as he stepped on the rug and on the other floor boards.

Sherlock picked up the file from the coffee table, and glanced over it. His face grew heavier. To be fair, it wasn't the first time he saw that file. He had seen it at Mycroft's office. He still didn't like what he read in those pages. Now he needed to investigate each single narrated event deeper, to find the mastermind behind the shootings. But having the file there was also a danger. John was there. Sure, he could send John home. But he wouldn't. So he needed to hide the file well, where John couldn't find it (easy) and neither could Mary (more challenging, but it could be done). Most of all, he needed time to read the file and scrutinize it. There was only one way of doing that... Sherlock put down the folder and went back into the kitchen and his sucrose dissolving in tea experiment.


	13. Chapter 13

-ooo-

'Have some tea, John, Mary.'

'You're making tea for us now, Sherlock?' she was fast at her suspicions. They both stood side by side at the kitchen door.

'Yeah, he does that sometimes, now', John tried to explain, feeling slightly guilty. Last time John had insisted on making the tea himself he had ended up doctoring himself with his friend by his side, and that might have made Sherlock decide on hurrying offers of tea all the time, before John could go back using his left arm by mistake to pick up the kettle... 'Which one doesn't have sugar on it?'

Sherlock handed him one of the two, and Mary the other one.

'And what is the tea for, Sherlock?' Mary demanded an explanation.

'I'm trying to convince you guys to stick around a while longer in Baker Street. I thought that was fairly obvious.'

John looked surprised, Mary tilted her head sideways.

-ooo-

'Hi, Greg', John ushered him in, circling the stained floor boards to reach him at the door. They shook hands briefly. 'Sorry to let you down, Sherlock is out cold. He's fallen asleep in the long sofa, and quite frankly, I hope we can let him carry on sleeping. He wouldn't want to hear me saying this but he's quite burned down by this... affair.'

The detective inspector followed John's gesture to the sofa to find Sherlock sleeping profoundly, with a certain look of child innocence to his features. He looked young, vulnerable, so different from the arrogant impassible mask usually displayed. 'I see, yeah, we'll let him sleep for now... How about you, John? Feeling better?'

'Yeah, fine, I'm fine.' Although Greg didn't expect another answer, he'd never buy it either. 'Any news on St. Bart's shooter?' he was showing his friend to the kitchen, where some half eaten food still lay, getting cold.

'Look, don't let me interrupt you. Eat away and I'll take a seat by your side.'

'Want some?' he offered at once. 'Mrs Hudson guarantees she was very famous in the States for this...'

'She probably just said that to convince you', Greg pointed out with a smirk.

'Yeah, I know...' John gave only a hint of a smile and remained restrained.

'She wanted me to give her your parents' phone number.'

'Who?' he was completely lost as he ate the food. Greg sat on the other side of the table.

'Mrs Hudson, your landlady. She wanted to phone your mother and tell her that you needed her.'

John stopped, chewing slowly. 'Oh, right. I guess she didn't notice', he said at last, 'that they weren't at my wedding... Why would she think you had the phone number?'

'Being the police she thought I could find that out, I suppose.'

'And she was going to tell my mother I had been shot?' he doubled back, with a smirk smile. 'She really is something else, isn't she?' he said sweetly.

'I can see how she got it wrong now', Greg defended.

'Sorry, what?' he really didn't understand.

'Anyway', Greg eluded, 'she also wanted to call your sister.' John nodded, as if expecting that.

'You didn't give her the number, I hope. Harry already has a lot on her mind right now.'

'I didn't want to squander police resources like that when she could easily ask you directly.'

'Squander? I took it as a routine computer search, done in ten seconds.'

'Probably less. Well, you type slowly, so yeah, ten seconds...'

John copied his smile. 'Look, I appreciate everyone trying to protect me, but I don't really need that.' (And honestly it confuses me.) 'How many times do I need to say that I'm fine? If anyone got the short end of the straw, it was Sherlock, not me. This whole situation must have been hell on him, not to mention it ruined his living room.'

Greg pursed his lips and nodded. 'You and I both know what it's like to see good people being shot.'

'I mean, thinking about people close to Sherlock, I think I'm the first one who ever made him deal with something like this. And you know how he is, he's got some trouble connecting with people to start with.'

'Yeah, he's Sherlock', the detective inspector was sharp.

'I imagine it must have been quite a shock.'

Greg nodded once more. John was in a talkative mood now and he chose to bait John and listen. 'Yeah, he texted me the night you got shot. I gather it was already from the ambulance.'

John frowned. 'He wasn't hurt.' Greg frowned, John was definitely on strong medication at the time.

'Yeah, but he took the ride with you on the ambulance. Didn't he tell ya?'

'Oh, right', he was clearly surprised. He'd glance on to the living room where his friend slept by instinct. 'Yeah... You know he did all that research? He saved my life.' John's words were calm and resigned.

'To be fair, it was the fact that you came here with him that got you shot in the first place.'

He frowned. 'I'd shrug my shoulders but I've found it challenging lately... Look, Greg, I'm not sorry, and I wouldn't make anything differently. No one could have foreseen what happened. Somewhere out there there is a crazy person making me and Sherlock targets. Some maniac doing it for fame, probably. Why else would he choose such complicated poison on old war bullets? It's like having Moriarty in the shadows all over again. The thing is this time I wasn't so lucky. It's okay, I accepted the danger all along, I knew days like this could come. And you know what? In the end, turns out I was indeed lucky. Mostly because Sherlock wouldn't give up on me.' He got quiet for a second, Greg was hardly surprised, that was a lot of personal talking for John in one sitting.

'Well, you pushed Sherlock out of the way at St. Bart's, John.'

'And?' he couldn't follow.

'That makes it even, doesn't it?'

John's face showed some tension and displeasure. 'I wasn't trying to be a hero, and honestly, I was none of that.'

Definitely heavy medication. 'Then what do you call it?' Greg insisted, surprised.

'I know how to shoot a bit. Learnt in the army. If anything should be spotting a marksman across the street it'd be me. Just that', John explained patiently.

'You threw both Molly and Sherlock on the floor while getting yourself into the line of fire, John.'

He frowned over his blue eyes for a second. 'Yeah, I owe Molly an apology, I hope she didn't get hurt from it.'

Very heavy medication. 'Look, John...' Greg started, and John actually looked at him, directly, honestly, waiting to hear his words. But Greg hesitated. He didn't know how to get through to him. The man was a soldier at heart, and kept firm on that believe that he needed to save the whole world from the wars he accepted for himself. 'John, the second bullet also had on the same casing. The same poison. This time there seems to have been a different shooter.'

'Sherlock thinks it's just the mastermind left, and he's the one doing the shooting now. That makes sense, since this last shooter was hardly as proficient as the first one.' John noticed his cold food and went back at it.

'How about the third target?'

'What third target?' John stopped again.

'I don't know, he didn't explain it to me, he just said he wasn't the main target after all. You don't know anything about that, John?'

'Nothing at all', John assured, looking worried. 'Why wouldn't he tell me that piece of deduction, I have no idea...' He shook his head. 'That's Sherlock Holmes, he enjoys being all dramatic.' Then he got up all of a sudden, very decided, and left his friend behind, in a hurry.

'Where are you going? John...?'

He just left Greg and stamped closed the bathroom door behind him. Greg looked down on to the plate and back down the hall. The medication had probably got John nauseous. He got up at once. 'John, talk to me...' He knocked on the door between them. 'John, tell me you're alright...' There was no answer, no sound. Greg tried the door knob. It wasn't locked and it opened immediately. He'd find him sitting on the floor with his knees up, he's back against the bathtub, lowering his head to his knees. Apparently he hadn't heard being called nor noticed Greg's presence. He was passing out.

Greg got on the floor next to him, holding him up straight. 'John, can you listen to me?'

First sign of recognition. Stunned, confused, but looking back steadily. 'Yeah, no need to go around shouting', he finally said, more collected.

'Has this happened before, John?'

'Hm? Oh, I just had a blood tension drop', he'd diagnose himself easily. 'I'm fine now. Thanks for caring, but I was fine, I really was.'

'Has it happened before?'

'Look, I'm a doctor!'

'Has it?'

'Yes, and it might not be the last time either. I ate too much. It's not going to happen in a dangerous situation, I've been careful.' He could see Greg wasn't buying it. 'Greg, this isn't the movies. There are things that happen when you get a good amount of blood transfusions. The human body has its own kind of memory. It's scientifically documented. I just have to bear through it, and it'll pass in the next couple of days.'

Greg's position alongside him was uncomfortable and he chose to adjust and sit on the cold tiles as well.

'Why didn't you tell anyone?'

'I had it under control, or so I thought... Look, I've been having enough attention, last thing I needed was _this_...' he pointed around him to their situation.

'Too bad this is exactly what you got', Greg told him sharply, getting up and offering him help to do the same. 'Off to bed, police orders.'

'No way.' John got up much sure of himself.

'Or I'll give Mrs Hudson the phone number.'

John glanced at Greg. 'You did understand that no one will actually pick up the phone?' he still didn't spell it out.

'Yes, I did. I'll give her my phone number instead, and I'll be on your case 24 / 7 from now on, John.'

'I don't need...' he started.

'You really do.'

-ooo-

Greg left Baker Street with a tired expression. In the end he had convinced John to stay in his armchair, resting, and Mary was supposed to return soon, she'd keep a watchful eye on him. Sherlock had missed the whole visit, snoring in the long sofa. He guessed John had been correct; that situation had really taken a toll on Sherlock as well.

'Mrs Hudson!' he found her at the cafe bellow. 'Could I have a word for a minute?' She nodded at once, surprised. 'It's about John...' They shared a worried expression from them on, evident to those who may have pass them on the street, but their precise words remained a secret shared only between them in the bustling cafe.

-ooo-

When Sherlock woke up, Mrs Hudson was dusting and John was sleeping in his chair. He couldn't really tell which of them annoyed him the most. No, even though he complained loudly about the dust, he was fairly annoyed at himself. He had fallen asleep, inexplicably. Sure, he was tired, but the heavy deep slumber was still drowning his mind.

'Is Mary asleep too?'

'Mary?' Mrs Hudson was confused. 'Sherlock, dear, she went out hours ago. Some emergency at work, she said.'

Mary was supposed to be sleeping. The tea he had prepared her. The sugared tea, he had spiked it. Not John's tea, though, he wasn't sure of the best dosage, and either way John would have retired at some point. But Mary, he needed to keep her under control, for her protection... All the while, she had switched cups with him somehow, and Sherlock was the one sleeping it off, while she went out dangerously free.

Oh, she was good... He smiled despite himself. Good enough to deceive Sherlock Holmes right under John's nose and get away with it. Sherlock couldn't call her out because of John's presence. But all she went on mysteriously doing, it was getting her into deep trouble all alone. Alone was what she did best. But John, he needed her, and that was why Sherlock insisted on his need to protect her...


	14. Chapter 14

-ooo-

Mary knew how to take care of herself. Quite frankly, Mary also knew how to take care of others - in every meaning of that expression, from the sweet love for the man who was her family now to a ruthless violence over anyone who tried to threaten her. Of course John couldn't know about that last part. And so, slowly, she had come to start lying about small things to John. Places she went, people she talked to... _You don't just turn your back on your old life._ You need to keep tabs on it, to make sure it won't catch up with you unexpectedly. She had no intentions of returning to her past. What she did secretly were preventive measures to insure just that.

And that was how she'd find herself at Camden Road, walking the alongside the brick walls of the old low industrial stores that hid some of the unordinary crowds of London. It was beyond the multicultural people, the embedded smell of curry and fries, the alternative look scenarios on display in the windows, it went deeper than that - if you talked to the right people, if you made the right impression, if you compensated them adequately. It was all business in the end. That was what Mary was looking for there. The illicit, the illegal, all up for auction at the right price.

She knew she had been followed for the last ten minutes. Now she finally stopped short, looking controlled over her shoulder.

'Give me your purse', a scruff looking man told her, holding a knife, enclosing the distance between them.

'No', she told him calmly.

'You heard me', he insisted, looking at her in a violent manner.

She shrugged her shoulders and reached for her purse, like she was about to take her wallet out. Instead she pulled a gun and pointed at him, coldly, slightly bored. 'No', she repeated, spelling every letter in the word.

'Okay', he got frightened and pulled back instinctively.

'I'm not done with you yet', Mary informed him. 'I'm going to need your help.'

'You're mental!'

'No, I'm pressed for time. Look, this is how I'm going to need you. You are going to tell people that I'm on the market for old World War Two ammunition, and I need them today. People who can supply me will meet me at Charing Cross Train Station in three hours, with the goods on a gym bag. I will settle the pay accordingly there, and today I'm in a generous mood... So, old ammunition, Charing Cross, three hours.'

'I don't know anybody!' he stated, almost looking scared.

'Do I look like the police to you?! Does this look like a registered gun?!' she was being sarcastic. 'Good pay. Split it with your friends. And use some of the money to take care of yourself, you need it.' She turned her back on him and kept walking away. She could see the reflection on the window displays of the stores that at first he hesitated, then he turned around and walked away from her at some speed.

-ooo-

Mary got off a cab in front of her home. Taking a hand to her pocket, she passed her fingertips over the metal of the keys for a second, before glancing over the shoulder to the seemingly deserted street. But no, not there, in that residential neighbourhood she was never alone. There were at least four snoopy neighbours. One of them was bed stricken by age and slightly demented, so she didn't count as a real life spy. But the other three were certainly on a look out. There was Woman #1, boring marriage, plump, moralist, with a stoned thief for a son that she praised like a saint, two doors down from theirs. Then there was Woman #2, middle age, skinny and dried to the bones, the typical widow who used to look at John as if she was undressing him with her eyes (John never noticed), across the street, with a bay window facing them. And Man #1 from next door, an unemployed x-rated movies addict that always spoke first at every neighbourhood meet, trying to pick up fights with everyone (John had one to stand up to him in defence of a single mum from the end of the street, now John was his favourite target for gossip).

Another one, Woman #3, opened her door next to the Watson's and came out to water her flowers on a perfectly damp rainy day. 'Oh, Mary, how are you today? Well, I haven't seen you these last few days, you were away?'

'Yeah, staying at a friend's house, actually. We'll be back in no time.' She opened the door with her key and let herself in, under the carefully disguised scrutiny of Woman #3. Pocketing her keys, she bent over the mat on the doorway and lifted it up. There was a loose floor board that she lifted. And right there, at a small compartment, was a transparent plastic bag with quite a lot of cash inside. She threw the bag in her purse and replaced the mat on the floor. John had never found that out. And she was hoping she hadn't the need to use it, nor to ever explain how she had come across it in the first place. She was doing it for both of their own good. If only John was as secretive as her, then maybe she could have felt like he had to forgive her deception. She had to force on her mind that he kept some things from her as well...

-ooo-

Charing Cross station. A beautiful mixture of tradition in the stone masonry architecture with the contemporary rush of today. As Mary came out of the supermarket nibbling on a snack she knew she was being watched by different people. To her left there was the Camden thief, on her right there was an indiscreet security camera (Mycroft Holmes might have some interest in that tape by the end of the day), behind her there was a concealed camera doubling up for the first, and closer to the gates there was a familiar outline with a smirked smile. Only the latter annoyed her.

She head on out to the nearest waste bin, to dispose of the packet of snacks. The man with the heavy gym bag approached as well. Mary threw out the packet and also took from her purse a crumpled envelope that she tossed out. The man had stopped a few steps away from her. He now hesitated but at last stepped forward to the waste bin, leaving the gym bag behind. As Mary passed by the gym bag she picked it up without even glancing at the man taking the envelope with cash out of the waste bin. His scruff look didn't make the gesture the more suspicious and it'd go unnoticed by the police officers guarding the station.

'Hello, Sherlock', Mary greeted as she approach him, gym bag in hand. 'Fancy seeing you here.'

'Before you ask: no, John is not here', he said, looking all around, 'so your secret is safe with me for now.'

She nodded slowly, pondering her options. He anticipated, trying to disarm her, perhaps: 'You're going to tell me you work better alone. That John cannot be burdened by knowing this. That you care for him.'

'Yes', she maintained, strong. 'Yes to all of those.'

Sherlock looked all around at the station, it was his time to talk again. 'John isn't with me', he repeated.

'I heard you the first time.'

'Greg took him back to the Hospital', he said, judging her reaction at close range, cold-bloodily. She turned to him, distressed but mostly distrusting. He elaborated: 'Some sort of reaction to the blood transfusions. Apparently the more you have in a short period of time, the more you react to them.'

'Why are you lying to me, Sherlock?' she held his gaze.

'I just told you that your husband...'

She cut him off: 'You wouldn't be here if he was at the Hospital, Sherlock... You did startle me, I'll grant you that. Was it a homemade punishment for me for not being the perfect housewife?'

'No', he stated quietly, 'it was a test, on how blind you are right now. And you failed it, Mary', he finished the conversation, walking away.

'You're not going to ask me what I have in my bag?' she taunted him.

He turned to her, still moving away. Confidently he assured her: 'I already know.'

She walked briskly to catch up with him. 'That was a low blow, using John to...'

He stopped short, and so did she. With a pained expression, he remarked: 'Think, Mary, don't be boring. Where did I learn that medical piece of medical trivia if John doesn't know I came here?' And he walked away again, leaving her puzzled, then suspicious.

-ooo-

Mary looked down on the abstract pattern of the marble flooring in the station, torn with doubt. Mentally she abused Sherlock with swear words, but her resolution was still as strong as always. She looked all around the station again and then turned to leave. She had a train to catch now. To the outskirts of London.

Travelling on the train with a bag full of old army bullets would have been disconcerting to most people, but Mary found herself partial to a sense of exhilaration that came from holding her ground to a major secret. Seated by the window, she took her phone out of her pocket for a second. She chose the contact name carefully from her list. But she didn't press Call. She didn't intend to. She just stood looking at the picture in the illuminated screen. John. Looking like John, doing John things, unaware of the camera. That was why she particularly cared for that picture. John being John. He may have been talking to Sherlock or Greg, just listening with a sense of wonder in his eyes, that innocent expression he had that was so accepting. Mary had never found a picture of him doing that to the camera on purpose, and there could be none, really.

Strange habit people had of placing pictures of people by their names, even though they knew them so well. Sherlock didn't do that, he much preferred the type of list a secret agent would have on his phone. John was probably discretely listed has JW. Also a precaution if he ever lost his phone on enemy hands. Trying to hide obvious link between the two of them. Greg had a picture of John drunk, has most of his phone list was. Molly had John in a picture with Sherlock in it as well (she bore either a very organized or an obsessed mind). Mrs Hudson's phone was low tech and she kept everyone with first and last name, followed by a mention of the city they were in. John Watson, London. All of John's closest friends, and they were almost his entire family as well apart from Mary, had a different outtake on him. But they had certainly all come together now that he had been vulnerable. And that was certainly something that Mary wasn't used to. She had always worked alone and taken in the consequences alone. What she witnessed now, she put it all on John, and that particular smile of his, and the fact that he was always out to help other people. Because honestly, the John that John was on an everyday basis was quite a stiff cold John, controlled, soldiered, that felt that he had to be like that for everyone's benefit. Not so much with Mary, of course, but even with his best friend he was like that. The two of them were. That's how they got along so well. Both slightly disconnected from the world, together.

It was about John, that ride, about to end with Mary stepping out of the train in a cold dark part of the town. She knew that place well. She went there every Friday, like clockwork. When her supposed gym class took place. Only there never had been a gym class to begin with. That was her free hour. The one to stroll the streets, read a book, or in case of necessity take control of people and events from her past.

There was this cafe where she came to sit on every Friday, it had become a habit. And today she returned there.

Two streets away she would stop a young woman on the street, a stranger, telling her a story and handing her a piece of paper. The woman smiled at last, nodded, and departed for the cafe. Mary watched the young romantic blond of approximately her height and built go take a seat in the cafe, eluded by the story of a love affair, and that Mary needed her to hand this romantic letter to a man that would soon come in to the cafe. The fact that she had payed the woman would assure that she stayed in the cafe at least for half an hour before realizing there wasn't a man to Mary's description coming in (and to be honest, Mary had described Sherlock, that had more uncommon features then John).

Mary walked to a near back alley where she took her place behind a dumpster, surveying the street. She was looking for the shooter, coming for his third victim. First it had been John, then Sherlock, now the shooter was after the big prize, he was after her.

And she'd get him before he could get her. The young woman in the cafe was a decoy, a necessary risk in order to end something bigger.

Mary took out her gun, scanning the empty flats across the street. The shooter was bound to use one of them. It was his method. And she'd stop him before he could take the shot. Anonymously, she'd end the danger, and just go back to Baker Street, hug John, lie to him and Sherlock about her whereabouts, and go back to the Watson's everyday life.

* * *

_A/N: Just to be clear, I have no idea of any illegal life in Camden - I made that up for narrative purposes. I grow tired of nondescript locations. And I've been to Camden once. Nostalgia, in short._

_"Most people, when they blunder around the city, all they see are streets and shops and cars." Thanks a lot, Mycroft, you've just described me._

_I've been called out before on inaccuracies as to my stories' London settings, and as much as I try to avoid them, like J. K. Jerome once said: the writer advises the reader not to regard his novel as a travel guide, it wasn't intended that way. -csf_


	15. Chapter 15

-ooo-

John could feel he was being watched. He had that nagging feeling for the last hour. He was under constant surveillance of Mrs H and she was getting to his nerves. He had gone to get a glass of water from the kitchen, and she had followed him there and back. He had picked up a towel from the bathroom, and she had practically followed him in. By the time he had actually closed that door behind him, Mrs H had gone to tell Sherlock about it. John was immersed in the twilight zone and he couldn't take it much longer. He knew it was out of care, but it was beyond his capabilities to comply with Mrs H constant need to make sure he was breathing right.

And Sherlock wasn't behaving much more normal, either. He kept pretending to concentrate on his computer, standing in front of it with his fingertips over the keyboard and staring at the screen, completely oblivious to the fact that the screen had gone dark ages ago.

John took in a deep breath. He was actively going insane, working himself up because he was stuck at Baker Street with two lunatics.

Mary - he smiled - he had Mary. Maybe he'd just surprise her, at her gym class. He knew vaguely where it was. He'd go to the other side of town and phone her once the class was over to find her. Yes, that was the best way to fix that evening...

He grabbed his phone from the kitchen table and pocketed it carefully. Then he bluntly headed off by the living room's door.

'Where are you going?' Sherlock called him out, he didn't even open his eyes.

'To grab my phone, on my coat', he yelled back from the end of the stairs. He grabbed his coat hanging by the door, put it on, and only then added, out of guilt: 'Also I'm going out for a couple of hours!' Immediately he banged the door shut behind him, greeting the cold night air outside with relief.

Sherlock needn't hear the last portion of John's call out. Just hearing the front door being unlocked told him everything he needed to know. He had miscalculated the extent of John's restlessness. To be fair, he probably hadn't noticed Mrs Hudson's fussing around John more than usual. That was the way she often behaved with Sherlock when she thought he wasn't doing well, anyway.

'Oh, dear... Sherlock?' Mrs Hudson worried.

Sherlock rolled his eyes, as he got his coat on. 'I'll see what he's up to, Mrs Hudson.' And he left, after his friend.

-ooo-

As Sherlock reached the street outside, there was no sign of John, just a cab pulling away.

As a matter of fact, another was already coming in. _Mycroft for the win_, he thought, haling it.

'Where to, mate?' the cabbie asked him.

'Just follow that cab.'

'No, I ain't getting myself into trouble, sir, you might want to get another cabbie for the job.'

'What?' Sherlock glared at him. 'No, it's... he's the one with the address, I haven't the address.'

'Well, then you should have asked your friend, right?' the driver insisted on letting John's cab drive out of sight.

Sherlock rolled his eyes and took out his phone. He dialed JW's number with annoyance.

«I'm fine, I'm just fine, jeeesss...» he heard from the other side. «I'm just going to meet Mary, we'll be back shortly, alright? Sherlock... _promise me you won't stalk me!_... Oh, great, now the cab driver thinks we're some weird couple!» Sherlock smiled, amused, as John hung up.

He looked down on his phone, worried. 'So, where will it be?' the driver insisted to the passenger.

Sherlock took a deep breath and told him the address to a small cafe where Mary took refuge of John every week.

Of course he knew it. He had been keeping tabs on Mary every since they had found out she had a secret past. John didn't know it though, and he wouldn't have approved of it, he had all the confidence in the world a regular husband could have for his wife.

Hell, even Mycroft was keeping tabs on Mary, and she suspected it.

Every Holmes was keeping tabs on Mary at that point. And given Sherlock and Mary's history together, both Holmes felt justified.

-ooo-

'There you go', John paid for the ride, wondering why Mary still wasn't picking up her phone.

Maybe she was out with some friends, having a coffee? The cold night enveloped him as he wondered of to the empty street.

-ooo-

Mary held her position behind the dumpster tighter as she finally noticed a veiled movement behind a cracked window on the second floor. She unlocked the firearm in her hand.

-ooo-

Sherlock's cab was still a few streets away. Methodically he was already scanning the houses and shops for the Watsons and their enemies.

-ooo-

John was passing by the cafe, as he hesitated and decided to go inside to warm up. Again he tried to ring Mary.

-ooo-

The silenced phone kept vibrating in Mary's coat pocket. She could feel it, but now wasn't the time to take a call. Probably Sherlock, annoying her again, he was the only one that knew she had a plan.

-ooo-

Sherlock took off from the cab, looking around on the street, by the warmly lit cafe. Everyone had a plan. Mary had a plan, John had a plan. Only Sherlock didn't have a plan.

-ooo-

'John!' he recognized him with relief as soon as he entered the cafe.

He was instantly annoyed, but not really surprised. 'You_ had to_ stalk me!'

'Where's Mary?' his words were tinted with concern.

'I don't know, she's not answering me', John replied at once, narrowing his eyes, Sherlock looked all around.

-ooo-

There was a loud bang of a firearm, and the sound of crashing glass. Muffled screams erupted somewhere, confusing.

The window shield of the cafe had come crashing down as the bullet shattered it to a million pieces. Natural instinct took hold of the people in the cafe, as they scattered for safety under seats and tables, screaming along the confusion. Most of them hadn't understood it was a gunshot, and where vaguely searching for answers outside, as they turned confused gazes to the street. It took a bit before someone realized that there was blood on the floor of the cafe, and two men were on that floor.

* * *

_A/N: Wicked cliffhanger? Check! (Sorry. So sorry.) -csf_


	16. Chapter 16

-ooo-

'Sherlock, talk to me - talk to me, now!' John Watson, former army doctor, was actually dictating a thundering order to his friend, at the same time he checked Sherlock's arm for the gunshot wound. He took a sigh of relief as he understood it had just grazed Sherlock. As nasty as a graze could be, it might have been far worse. John held him tight in his arms (his own shoulder was hurting like crazy from the effort but he wouldn't ever let go again). 'You stupid ...bastard... what the ...hell... were you thinking?!'

'What?! I got you out of the way of a bullet, John!' he yelled back, indignant.

'Exactly!?' John yelled, with lost temper, but controlled actions.

'Would you prefer to be shot again?!'

'Yes!' he answered sincerely, before he could register what he had just said. 'Yes', he said, very calmly then. 'And No.'

'I know', Sherlock told him back, and then he frowned. 'This stings a lot', he complained.

John nodded as he kept pressuring a napkin against the wound. 'I'd think you'd know that, since it wasn't the first time you're shot.' John had to fight for his self-control every inch of the way, away from the memories of that other time, in Magnussen's office flooding him.

'Yeah, we're pros, now', Sherlock joined in, for John's benefit.

Despite the faked good humour, none of them was in a happy place. From far, they could hear the police sirens and the ambulance someone had called.

'And we'll take the bullet with us', Sherlock directed, with a strained voice.

'I know, I've already spotted it. But, Sherlock, _there is no casing_. No poison.' John was playing along, as if the case was the important thing. Surreal. Doubtfully he'd ever feel like a case was important ever again.

Even Sherlock had to glance at the bullet embedded on the wooden flooring, the best he could from his position.

'What does that mean?' John murmured. But Sherlock didn't answer and the paramedics were stepping in already. John turned to them with control, and said, in a clear emotionless voice: 'Male, healthy, no history of chronic diseases, gunshot graze wound to the upper right arm region, the cut was clean and the bleeding is controlled at the moment. His blood type is O-, and he's not on any medication at the moment, and has no allergies. He'll need about five stitches transversely. Oh, and I'm going with you in the ambulance, guys.'

Sherlock had his gaze frozen on John. All of a sudden he looked distant, cold, as Sherlock felt frail, vulnerable. For a second, he wondered if John cared as much as Sherlock had cared, turned off by the army doctor façade. Then Sherlock's gaze fell upon John's shoulder, quite by accident. And he saw the blood stain erupting on John's shirt, still disguised under his jumper, but even if the paramedics couldn't see John's pain, John could certainly feel it to his core, as he kept holding Sherlock up, uselessly, as the stretcher was being set, John wouldn't let go of Sherlock, wouldn't let his friend and hero fall to the ground.

'I'm okay, John', he found himself lying, the same way John had done. A lie to help others, to protect them from a truth that was set on stone. John smiled to him, as if he could believe it, he really couldn't.

-ooo-

'Six, John!' Sherlock protested as they waited for the nurse to bring in the dismiss papers for the patient. 'You said five and they made it six stitches, John.' They sat side by side in two stretchers on a small nursing room at the Hospital. There was a curtain between them, but it had been pushed back so they could see each other.

'Honestly, Sherlock, I'm just a GP now, my bad...' he claimed, half-smiling, slumping himself back on the uncomfortable stretcher. Again he had his shoulder exposed and had been awarded a couple new stitches as well. His voice was getting slurry from the anaesthetics.

Sherlock had had some too, but his had been more localized so he felt better in his arm, and much less hazy. The tremors and cold that had come with shock were fading at last. In the end it was transport for his mind, his body, he needed to keep that present. An annoying setback, an incentive to catch the one responsible. Sherlock was carefully getting his shirt back on over his bandaged arm, wondering if he should leave now, or if he'd actually wait to be discharged before heading back into the case at hands. He didn't want to leave before John (lest the need to reenter the hospital illegally later on) so he settled for staying quietly for now.

'You're not going to sleep now, and leave me here alone, are you?' Sherlock asked John, before he could check himself.

John smiled, a happy childish smile. 'I could sit here hearing you talk for ages.'

Sherlock looked at him sideways. 'What have they gone and put into you, John?'

He laughed and then answered truthfully with a complicated long chemical compound name. 'The fun part of it will wear off in five minutes, don't worry...' he waved off in the air. 'Oh, yeah, you never worry, I forgot again', he shook his head with a bit too much enthusiasm for a non-drugged up person.

'Actually...' Sherlock started, more animated with his friend's currant outtake on life, 'I worry a lot, John.' He'd probably forget all about it in a couple of hours, anyway.

John half-closed his eyes, drowsy.

'Are you sure you're reacting normally?' Sherlock asked him, for what it was worth.

He nodded again, before he burst into giggles. 'It's not funny, so stop it', he said firmly, looking at him with a sweet expression in his blue eyes.

'Now you're starting to freak me out', Sherlock commented with a smile.

'I just wanted to make you laugh', he spilled the beans. 'I was meant to keep quiet. And you were told not to talk to me.'

'Yes, I was...' he remembered. 'So this was funny why?'

He giggled, helplessly. Then he grimaced. 'It's wearing off, now...'

'Maybe it's for the best', Sherlock assured him, quietly.

There was a slight knock on the door, and Mycroft appeared. Still in a better mood, Sherlock acknowledged: 'I'd rather have the red haired nurse to get us out of here, Mycroft.'

'She'll be in shortly', he assured his brother, sternly. 'So, it grazed your arm, did it?'

Sherlock nodded, serious. 'I bet you've read all my medical file before you came here, you know this is not important.'

Mycroft shrugged, like he probably did. On the other stretcher, John burst out in giggles. Mycroft looked at him slightly appalled, then to Sherlock, who confided: 'We're not supposed to keep him talking... But _it's fun_. John, you remember Mycroft, my brother?'

John frowned for a moment, before telling Mycroft, slurring: 'You owe me... a cat.'

Mycroft's eyes widened before turning to Sherlock, who was trying hard to keep his laughter silent. 'Oh, he's talking about his own sister when he was a child, never mind', he dismissed it briefly. 'He was more fun before you came in.'

'That bullet', Mycroft focused, 'was it meant for you or for him?'

'Don't know', Sherlock alleged, but his brother believed he was holding something back.

'If you got shot because of _him_!' he said in a furious manner before he could contain himself, pointing openly at John, who now followed what he said hazily.

'Mycroft, are you caring?' Sherlock answered in the same way, angry that John was there to hear his words. Mycroft just pursed his lips tight and assured: 'Convince me you know what you are doing, and that you are safe, or I'll pull you off Baker Street, Sherlock.'

'I'm happy to see you too', said Sherlock as he turned to leave, more controlled.

'And please don't make me _come back here again_', he said, loathing the Hospital. More than that, secretly caring very much for his brother. Sherlock smiled, only after he left.

'John?' he called his friend.

'Hm?' he heard grunt back.

'Are you awake?'

John burst into innocent giggles, again. Sherlock smiled, _that was fun_.

'You're not in pain, are you?'

'No, it's fine!'

'You're not angry at me, are you?'

'No, it's all fine!'

Sherlock stared at him.

'You're not lying, are you?'

'It's fine!'

'Hm?' Sherlock frowned.

John looked sad. 'I'm sorry, I didn't catch... Double negatives...?'

'You should sleep it off, John', he finally let go.

'Will you stay there?' he asked, vulnerable, and closing his eyes. Doubling Sherlock's earlier question.

'Yes, I will', he assured him, quietly. 'Have nice dreams.'

He smiled. 'You also.'

-ooo-

'Didn't expect to see you two back in here so soon', Greg said, worriedly, as he caught up with Sherlock and John being discharged out of the Hospital, the next morning.

'Where are the flowers?' Sherlock noticed. This time, Greg hadn't brought flowers as he had for John.

John reproached him with a fast glance, Greg replied anyway: 'I'm on a tight budget, and the pair of you seem to be coming here a lot.'

'Just joking', John alleged, trying to make peace. 'Last night, that was weird, Greg. We need to start considering that someone might be following our every move. There is just no way anyone knew where I was going last night...'

Greg asked, forcefully. 'Care to elaborate on that, Sherlock?'

'What do you mean?' John defended him, on instinct.

'Well, Greg realizes I knew where you were going, John', Sherlock spelled it out.

'Yeah, but you hadn't real plans to be going there more than I did!'

The detective inspector asked then: 'And Mary?'

John turned to him. 'Went home after the gym class and never even knew what had happened before Sherlock called her.'

'You didn't call her yourself?'

He frowned. 'I think I spoke to her, not sure what I said, the anaesthetics had taken a big toll on me... It... hm... reopened, that's why they wanted me here for the night as well.' John was avoiding Greg's look, now, Sherlock noticed. John didn't want to explain his injury yet again.

'And you, Sherlock?' he turned to the other friend.

'It just grazed my arm', he explained, stern as the situation seemed to call for. Honestly he didn't care much about it anymore. Now it was just the annoyance of having to spare his dominant arm in the daily chores. Of course John would never hear of not caring about a bullet graze, so there was a perceived battle ahead in the next weeks. 'Six stitches, although five would suffice.' John glanced at him, confused.

'And which one of you was the target, after all?'

'I think it was me', Sherlock stated calmly. 'No way we can be sure. We were on the move, pacing and turning, the shooter could have aimed at any of us, really. Either way, he was repeating himself.'

'Why would he aim at your arm?' Greg wouldn't let it go. He knew something was up, even from Sherlock's expression.

'We already know that this second shooter is less proficient than the first.'

Greg pursed his lips straight, there was something quite not right...

John talked, all of a sudden: 'There was no poisoned casing this time. That's significant.'

'Yes. We're working in the bullet, but so far it appears to be similar to the other ones... So,' he tried to lighten the mood, 'which one of you two is going to get fussed over by Mrs Hudson now?'

As immediate reactions, John pointed over at Sherlock and Sherlock frowned annoyed.


	17. Chapter 17

-ooo-

'Mary, it's time to come clean to John, I can't cover for you anymore.' He looked worried for a second. 'I probably shouldn't have done so in the first place.'

'This is hardly the time to develop a conscious, Sherlock', she talked him down, rolling her eyes. 'And besides you can't tell John about me without telling him you've known all along and kept it a secret from him.'

They were standing at a cashier line of a take away restaurant, the closest one to Baker Street. They were surrounded by people, but no one seemed to pay attention to them. Anonymity by numbers, as it were. And none of the spectators seemed to be playing attention to the arm raised to the detective's chest by a protective fabric support.

'John must understand.'

She smiled coldly. 'Only he won't, and he'll pull back from both of us, and we'll lose him both. All the while with a shooter coming after all of us. Is that what you really want?'

'You're blackmailing me, Mary', he said casually, keeping up with the look of one more casual conversation among so many others.

'Yes, I am. And I've been very clear about that from the start, too', she replied in honesty, her big blue eyes rounding in an amiable light.

'So, you just expect me to keep covering for you?'

'Yes. Look, Sherlock, I'm not dragging this situation any longer than it must', Mary tried to sooth.

'You'll really do anything to keep John in the dark, won't you?'

'I guess so.'

'I mean, shooting me yesterday...' Sherlock pondered casually.

There was shock in her expression, than a slight distrust. She gave the restaurant a fast calculating glance.

'The great Sherlock Holmes figured it out... So, what did I do wrong?'

'No poison coating on the bullet.'

'I see... Well, the bullet the real shooter was aiming at you or John had the full trimmings I imagine. That's why I had to break it off.' Her voice was steady and self-assured.

'And you had to shoot me.'

'It's hardly the first time', she faked a smile. 'Though in fairness this time I made sure it wasn't serious.'

'Why not aim at the shooter like it was your original plan?'

She sighed, tiredly. 'The shooter went to the cafe area to look for me. I had a decoy set in place. But I had to give a story to the decoy, I had to make her stand there and look for a specific face in the crowd. She was making her move on you and John, and I couldn't have her describing me to the two of you. The shooter must have spotted you both when she did. Now there was the real danger that he'd shoot John before I could stop him. I had no good angle, I had to improvise... Sherlock, I didn't mean to cause you pain. Instinct kicked in, and that was the only solution I came up with... What would you have done?'

He faked a cold smile.

'I'd have shot the lamp on the ceiling, pulling everything dark, no blood loss.'

She nodded respectfully. 'Well, I wasn't that clever.'

'And the all the rest of the bullets you collected at the train station?' he recovered.

'I'm making a deal to sell them. Hopefully our shooter will be interested. Want to join in the fun?'

Sherlock grimaced. 'You just want me to keep quiet from John.'

'Well, yes, isn't it obvious?' she smiled. 'I'm manipulating you, Sherlock, but I'm not lying to you. I like you too much for that.'

-ooo-

'There you go, Mrs Hudson', John announced, as he insisted on picking a heavy jar of water with his right hand. Again he seemed to be feeling that need to prove that he was absolutely fine, and no one should care to mention the recent events, as he always did. She tried to keep him at bay, fussing over him like a mother. Together, they were setting the meal to everybody, in Baker Street's living room, where the table was now centre stage.

'You just sit down, John Watson, you've done enough for a day already, dear', she repeated.

'Well, I can do more and fetch glasses for everyone...' and he went back into the kitchen.

'John, don't you dare...!' and he almost burst out giggling. (Next would come the vain threats.) 'John, if you don't sit down, I'll... I'll donate all the old stuff you left here to the charity shops!'

'Perhaps you should!' he replied light-heartedly.

'And I'll rent your room upstairs so you can never come back to spend a night!'

'I'll just sleep on the sofa!'

'And I'll never bake you a cake for tea again!'

'Oh, that one actually gets me worried', he told her with a smile.

As John finally took a seat at the table (there was nothing else to be done, really), Mrs Hudson was watching him with a smile. There was her John back. She had missed that John, more open and light. She had no idea what was going on in his head, but she was glad to see him happier.

'Just at the right time!' she realized as they heard Sherlock and Mary's return, downstairs.

They'd come up with a light-hearted attitude that complemented that family-like reunion.

'Oh, Sherlock, you didn't get yourself tired, did you?' Mrs H worried at once, hurrying to reach him, to John's fun and Sherlock's (faked) annoyance. Mary followed the scene with a smug smile.

'It's nothing', he minimised, 'and they gave me extra stitches. John would have done a better job', his friend looked stunned, 'if he wasn't too busy getting the attention for himself...'

John was going to say something, but then he held his breath. Instead, he said, flatly: 'Yeah, sorry about that.' There was some resentment on how childish his friend was.

'He does this double knot thing on the stitches that...'

'Shut up', John interrupted, not meeting his eyes. 'Please.'

Sherlock glanced at John, confused. 'I imagine it's what doctors do in the battle field because it's sturdier and patients need to be moved around often and...'

'I said "please".'

Sherlock glanced again at John and wrapped it up: 'So, basically, John and I could have taken care it all ourselves, which means it wasn't that much to start with', he'd finished proudly.

Mary frowned and questioned back, like he wasn't really human: 'You're not serious, are you?'

'Sherlock!' John demanded silence, looking at him straight. His friend finally faced him.

'Nooo...' he dragged the word slowly, giving it a slight dubious quality. Sherlock lied to appease John, but only because he realized that was what his friend wanted, not really because he understood his need to disguise his abilities. Mary appeared confused. John sunk his head a bit – one of the best minds in the world, and socially a misfit.

'Potatoes, anyone?' Mrs H came to the rescue.

'Yes, please, let's seat down', John played along, glancing at the table, checking yet again if anything was missing. They took their seats at the table enjoying themselves.

'Oh, it's so nice to have my boys back here again', Mrs Hudson started, with a deep smile. Sherlock smiled as well, disguising a wink for her to see, and John glanced over at her as if surprised and then pleased.

'It's nice to be a part of this', Mary said, and John smiled at her, proudly. 'We need to do this more often, and not just when these two get themselves into trouble, Mrs Hudson, right?'

'Mary, dear, those two are _always_ in trouble!'

'She meant us being shot', Sherlock translated too fast, without checking with John.

'I know she did', Mrs H said patiently. 'Just that it's a bit rich coming from her...' she shook her head sadly. 'She shot you before.'

John chocked on a piece of potato, bursting out in coughs to clear his throat.

'Let's just say it wasn't the first time for either of us', Sherlock resumed with a cat-like smile, as John gathered his breath. 'These things happen...' he added like it wasn't important.

'Getting shot _happens_?' John couldn't contain himself, staring at his friend.

'You should know, it wasn't your first time either...' He got up abruptly, explaining himself: 'I heard Greg Lestrade's footsteps outside, I'm going to open the door to him.'

'I'll go', John immediately interrupted him sternly, 'you sit down and eat, you just got shot.' And to insist, John gave him a heavy look as he got up. Mrs H tried to take his place in her turn but he placed a soft hand on her shoulder to assure her he was sure he could do it. Taken a bit by surprise, John was always so controlled that the soft touch was really out of character for him, she actually accepted. She turned back to Sherlock, making sure he was comfortable.

As John descended the stairs, Mary snapped at Sherlock: 'What are you trying to do?'

'Giving you a chance to cough up', he answered calmly.

'Don't you dare', was all she said, as Mrs Hudson followed their conversation.

'Oh, dear...' Mrs Hudson said at last. 'Oh, Mary, _not again_...' Mary rolled her eyes at Sherlock, who remained motionless. Most of all, Mary was waiting for all hell to break loose from the other part of the table. 'You need to tell John at once. He's not going to like it...' advised Mrs H, and she shook her head sadly.

Mary was stunned. Mrs Hudson's reaction couldn't have been further from what she would have imagined.


	18. Chapter 18

John and Greg were already coming up 221 Baker Street stairs together. 'I'll get you a chair, Greg, and a plate, there's enough to go around twice...'

Greg had to grab him by the elbow to make him stop. 'I can do that myself, John, you should seat down.'

'It's fine, no trouble at all', John was already going into the kitchen for another chair, Greg hasted to pick it up himself.

'So, what were you guys talking about when I got here?' Greg asked, pulling his chair to the table.

Mary and Mrs Hudson hesitated but Sherlock produced the answer on the spot: 'Getting shot. How about you, Greg, have you ever been shot?'

He blinked, and then looked over at John for answers. John was already handing him a plate and silverware and appeared embarrassed. Greg gave up his help at once and answered: 'Once, but it wasn't serious, I was lucky.'

Sherlock insisted: 'Then John and I had been shot more times than you, Greg.'

'It's hardly motive to brag... Anyway, why are you keeping score? Let's just give John the prize and give up, shall we?' The detective inspector tried to end it quickly.

John had sat down again, very stiff on his chair and with his gaze glazed. Mrs H was looking at him in concern and Mary was attentively waiting for him to snap out of it and notice her sympathy.

'John gets the trophy? I think you miscounted there, Greg. I've actually read his army file.' Mary shifted her attention to Sherlock.

'Not everything goes into the file, because as soon as you get officially shot you're sent back for evaluation. And, if you happen to be an army doctor...' he tilted his head. Sherlock looked over at John. He was very quiet.

'Oh, I see... Well spotted', was all he could say when John was noticeably absent. (John, the quiet loyal soldier as always.)

'He told me that once, I think he was already drunk on a birthday. You were invited too, Sherlock, but you didn't come.'

'And how many times, then, John?' he asked directly at his friend. John didn't move, only shifted his gaze towards him. Then slowly closed his eyes tight.

'Might have been more than once', he finally admitted with a course voice, opening his eyes directly at the wall ahead of him.

Greg helped him out: 'You told me about it once over a pint, on your birthday, but you were very drunk already.' Mrs Hudson gasped in concern.

He slowly carried his gaze towards Greg. 'Did I?' he asked expressionless, ghost-like.

'Oh, nice', Greg got sarcastic, 'so it was more than one other time?' he immediately read. He was getting angry, out of concern for John.

'I was drunk', John suddenly recovered all faculties and speed, replying with confidence and energy. 'I was pulling your leg, Greg, sorry about that, I admit now that it was in poor taste. I really must have been wasted that night. Birthdays, yeah, birthdays...' He was putting his energy into eating now.

'John? It's a bit late for that, you've already admitted it.'

'Admit what? I was a doctor, doctors don't get to see much action out there', his voice was gaining confidence. But it was useless, Mrs H was placing a gentle hand on his arm, with a pained expression. He looked at her honestly, with a sadness in his eyes for upsetting her.

Mary repeated in the same tone: 'Yeah, birthdays... He was joking, Greg.'

They shared a look that proved that both knew it wasn't a joke.

Sherlock frowned, the unspoken interactions had passed him by. Why were they playing along with John's lie? Why was he getting away with it? Why whenever Sherlock said something inappropriate no one ever let go, and when John was under the spotlight all of a sudden people changed the subject?

'That wasn't a joke! Isn't it obvious?' Sherlock pointed out, indignant. John just looked at him, with half of a smile, a bitter smile that then turned sweet. His friend was the only one there that wouldn't bow to the constraints of social interactions, defending the factual truth as if it were as important there as in his cases.

'Maybe we should let our guests eat, and we could talk later, Sherlock?' he asked, fully aware the subject wouldn't go away just by postponing it. In the process, however, he had just made a small mistake, and apparently only Sherlock had noticed the phrasing. _Our_ guests. Mary, Greg, Mrs H as guests. Well, that would have been true back in the days John lived in Baker Street, not anymore. A simple tong slip that Sherlock enjoyed because it reminded him of the past. The one that still came around, but not as often. Now John had a full time job, a wife, and a new home. And Sherlock was mostly alone.

'Fine', Sherlock sustained.

John looked all around for a distraction. Mrs H came to the rescue.

'The potatoes are very nice indeed. Care to have some more, Detective Inspector?'

'Greg, call me Greg, and I'm fine, Mrs Hudson, thanks.'

There were knocks on the door downstairs, this time it was Mary getting up. Sherlock deduced immediately: 'It's Molly, now.'

'We should have brought more food', Mary commented.

'I invited Greg and Molly over', Sherlock said, lightly. She was already on her way down to the door and didn't say more. Anyway, he had been shot last night, and if he felt like having the only people in the world that cared for him around, it made sense in its own way, and it was more of Sherlock being human than Mary had ever seen of him.

'I'll get another chair', John snapped out of it, halting Sherlock with a brisk commanding gesture. It worked immediately. Greg suppressed a laugh with difficulty. Sherlock frowned at him, after he sat back down in obedience.

'Hello, Molly, welcome', John said as he added another chair around the small table. 'Have a seat.'

She'd look on straight at Sherlock before she turned to the chair and John. 'Feeling better, Sherlock? The two of you, I mean...'

John passed the question along to Sherlock with a look. Sherlock assured: 'We're fine, it was nothing.' Molly smiled quizzically. Sherlock didn't quite understand. That was what John always said, that must have been the appropriate cover up answer, therefore.

Molly took a seat by Greg's side with a shy smile. 'So, why did you call us here, Sherlock? This is quite a gathering', she opened his game. John glanced at Sherlock in surprise.

'Time economy', he replied. 'It's time to set up a trap to our _friendly neighbourhood_ shooter and put this to a close at last. It's been going on for too long now. And everyone at this table will have a part in the plan.' He took a moment to look around. Mrs Hudson, Greg, they all seemed a bit dumbstruck. He glanced over at John, to sense his reading of the crowd. He looked confident, eager even, but Sherlock still hesitated. John always looked confident of his plans. Would they play along? Sherlock never really worked plans for teams, apart from some sparse contributions from his homeless network. But trusting John was implicit, Greg would be of assistance because of Scotland Yard, Molly offered chemical expertise to the gang, Mary's assistance as a specialist was invaluable, even Mrs Hudson could do a small part in the plan.

'Tell us about it', John asked him.

'I'd rather keep it open to improvisation, that way works best. I'll just let each one of you know what I want from you.'

-ooo-

'That was _nice'_, the consulting detective admitted with some degree of difficulty, sitting at his armchair, receiving the daylight from the window at his back, his face deep in those shadows, similar to those mysteries he craved to solve.

At the time, Sherlock and John were the only ones left in Baker Street, after the living room had been transformed back to normal, with no traces left of their lunch.

John smiled, taking a seat in his own armchair, facing his friend. 'You don't need to try so hard, Sherlock. Well, I enjoyed it very much, missed it to be fair, so thanks for playing along.'

Sherlock faced John. 'You said you've been shot before, several times.'

John readjusted his position in the chair, involuntarily. It was a major give away, but he never seemed to realize it. 'I wouldn't go as far as saying "several"...'

'Why don't you like saying it? You were doing your job.' (A war hero, again.) 'Although, of course, it's debatable whether you should have been sent there in the first place... But you had your mission and you avoid taking about it for some reason, and it's not foreign politics...'

John stopped short for a second, stunned. He diverted his gaze to the fireplace as he said out loud: 'Isn't it obvious? I'm a useless used up soldier that got his fun on the battlefield until one shot too many threw me back in London. That's the easiest deduction around about me.' He forced a painful brave smile upon his face, but his eyes didn't match that expression.

'You liked being there? You wanted to stay there?' Sherlock's questions were innocent, he really wanted to understand.

'I left people there, Sherlock. My people, I failed them.' He admitted it maintaining the same frozen and intense expression.

'No, you absolutely didn't.'

'How would you know?' his smile was now bitter as if the expression in his eyes had sipped through to his constrained lips.

'I know because I'm your people now, John. That's how I know.'


	19. Chapter 19

-ooo-

'You won't tell me what your plan is, Sherlock. And you're only keeping it a secret because you like to be the hero. We've talked about this before...'

Sherlock disguised a smug smile from John. The suburbs night was deeply immersed in darkness, only pierced by the repetitive hallos of the lamp lights. The street was well know to the both of them, as one of them lived there and the other one avoided with all his might to visit him there.

Sherlock had always flat out refused to visit John and Mary's home or created the most inventive excuses not to do it. The only exception being that one night with Molly, to pack overnight bags for the Watsons. For as much as he had avoided entering that house, as he did so with Molly he felt like he knew it by heart already. John's study was a room with a window facing south, and every weekend he got a small redness sunburn in his right earlobe from the sun crossing the window, as he had obviously angled the table so the light would fall upon his papers undisturbed by his dominant left hand. The kitchen's refrigerator had a stubborn door that needed to be shut hard and so John had started to do the same thing to Sherlock's refrigerator out of habit. The living room's sofa had a small long and hard pillow that John always placed on his favourite chairs to help with the back and shoulder pains he got on damp spots, and unfortunately his house was damp according to a small rustled leaf John had carried on his sleeve, from his garden, a species accustomed to wetlands. Sherlock knew all this and much more even before he'd actually set a foot inside the house. And yet, by his side, his friend was acting all serious and socially adequate, promising he'd show him around the house, to make Sherlock as comfortable in it as he was in Baker Street.

'You will, of course, notice the fundamental difference of the lack of body parts in my house', John noticed, with a smirk.

'I'll bear through it', Sherlock promised back.

'I really wished you could just cough up your plan already.'

'Patience. It's all under control. Just don't get surprised. This time you're here as the public, that's all, John.'

John didn't feel appeased at all. 'So, what did everyone do?' he circled his original question.

'Mrs Hudson transported old war ammunitions in a gym bag by bus, and Greg got me as very special rifle from the Yard's locker, Molly assembled a simile coating for the bullets.'

'And Mary?'

(Mary is the bait and the hero, how about that for your love life, John?) 'Oh, she's got an important role, I wouldn't let her out.'

Suddenly, as they walked down the street, there was the sound of a heavy bullet fired and glass shattering. They staggered in surprise. It came from the Watsons residence. Sherlock looked over at his watch. No, the timing was wrong, something was wrong. And before he could think, John had read it in his expression and dashed in a mad run towards his house, where a window stood with a broken glass.

'John!' Sherlock raced after him, he couldn't understand what went wrong, who had started it and why so soon, all he knew was that John was now running towards a house that had just been shot at, with no plan at all, just a mad scare gushing inside him. 'John!'

'Mary!'

As John raced headfirst into the house they shared he hardly had notion of how he called out her name, in despair, with a course voice. He needed to make sure she was alright, that he hadn't just lost her, that he hadn't caused her loss by going in with an unknown plan. Last thing he noticed was that someone else was calling his name in a scared voice. His friend followed his mad race, trying to get some sense into John, to make him more rational.

John raced up the stairs several steps at a time, high on the adrenaline of the moment, fighting how slow his body could be, how in his mind he already explored the recesses of the rooms upstairs, frantically searching for Mary. Behind him, Sherlock was losing the race, overcome by exhaustion, holding his arm in a tight grip, cursing the protective streak in John that made him totally useless, hardly rational, incredibly obsessive.

John was already entering and leaving different rooms in the first floor, racing from one to the next, throwing himself into the line of fire, in complete disregard for the danger he was in. Finally Sherlock was able to catch up with him, as John was to pass him by and race back downstairs. He grabbed John by the arm, trying to halt him.

'Mary's not here, John, she must be fine', he tried to calm him down.

'They wouldn't have shot into an empty room', John replied in a strained voice and pushed him aside to pass and run downstairs.

'You need to be careful!' his friend protested, realizing he'd just have to race downstairs now.

'Just stay there!' John snapped back without giving a damn about _careful_. Sherlock sighed, leaning against the balcony on the top of the stairs. He was exhausted, and quite frankly he already knew what John himself could have deduced if he wasn't so blinded by emotion. The shooting had been a mistimed isolated incident promoted by Sherlock, Mary was okay and up to speed on Sherlock's plan. And if the detective hadn't let John in on it, it had been precisely because of that sort of reaction. John would have never accepted a plan in which Mary was bait. Safeguarded bait, for sure, he had taken the adequate precautions and she was well aware of the plan.

Downstairs, John came back from the kitchen to the corridor with his gun in hand, gasping for air, a terrified look on his face, as he strived to assure himself that everything was okay. He took out his phone and dialled Mary's number, halting on the corridor. He closed his eyes tight, desperate to hear her voice and not the intermittent machine beep of the apparatus.

To Sherlock's complete surprise, a phone ring echoed from the first floor bedroom, behind him. John and Sherlock exchanged a very brief scared look, then both hasted towards the source of the sound.

Sherlock would get there first, but he couldn't get his head around the sound he heard. That was not the plan, that couldn't been happening, Mary was supposed to be safe on the outside, not there, in danger, never there, John had been right all along, and now Mary could be hurt... Sherlock got to the bedroom first. The room was drenched in darkness, even as the curtains were drawn open. There was only a small amount of light coming in from the street lamp across the road. Enough to blind Sherlock of any shooter hiding in the shadows behind it, so he hesitated in approaching the window. Instead he stood by the door, peering inside. 'Mary?' he asked out loud, though he still couldn't believe it, they had a different plan, she had agreed.

'Sherlock.' He finally spotted her. Of course she was there. She had been there, hiding in the shadows, with a similar rifle drawn in hand, and was now approaching the window. She had gone rogue with his plan.

John was racing up the stairs and he was just reaching the landing. Sherlock was confused. John hadn't seen Mary as he went through the rooms. But Mary's phone had given her away, the one that kept ringing because neither of them had yet thought of ending the call.

A gunshot echoed at the same time of the sound of more glass shattering from inside the room. Both Sherlock and Mary recoiled, ducking for protection. John never stopped running, launching himself inside the bedroom calling her name. Mary's name. Sherlock should have stopped him, he realized only too late that John was completely disregarding his safety by throwing himself into the line of fire in protection mode for Mary. With his gun in hand, he'd launch himself to the window, over the shattered shiny droplets of glass on the floor, and aim straight up his gun into the shadows of the street. It'd take him a second, not more, to lock the aim over the outstretched hand pistol to metallic flicker of a rifle on the other side of the street. Sherlock tried to race to grab him and pull him down before he got shot. But before he could hardly move, John had fired his gun. Only once, carefully, deliberately, with a deeply pained expression and cold precise body language. He lowered the gun realizing what he had done. Then, suddenly breathing deeply like he was actually gasping from air from his race upstairs, he launched himself to where Mary had been standing all along, standing blankly as she watched him take the nearly impossible shot.

'Mary, are you okay?!'

She nodded, speechless. 'John...' she tilted her head, tears were coming to her eyes. 'You could have been shot, what did you do? What did I make you do?' she whispered sweetly, desperately.

John glanced at the window. His shot had widened the bullet hole in the window pane, and surprisingly it hadn't crashed yet. With a deep sad breath he asked: 'Sherlock, call the police, I have hit our shooter.'

Sherlock was already by their side. 'We need to get out of here at once. I'm not letting you go to prison for this, John.'

John looked sadly to him. 'I did what I had to do, I accept its consequences.'

Mary interceded. 'It was self-defense!'

'It's an unregistered illegal gun implicated with a few other illegal stuff we've done.' John faked a valiant smile. 'It's finally going to be traced back to me. I suppose it's only fair.'

'Sherlock, but this was your plan, that I'd lure and shoot the shooter', Mary insisted, shocked.

Sherlock lowered his gaze, tense. 'With a rifle identical to the one he used. It wouldn't be traced to any of you.'

John asked, strained: 'Call the police, Sherlock, and then take Mary with you. I'll tell them both shots were aimed on me.'

Mary was out of breath. 'Greg, he can help us!'

'He can't cover for this.'

'Your brother then, Sherlock', she insisted.

'He wouldn't get involved... Mary, I did what I had to do. I'll take the consequences.' John insisted bravely.

'Maybe you didn't even hit him, across the street.'

'No one left that house, Mary. Don't you think that if I had missed him, he'd leave at once?'

'But John...'

Sherlock was stone cold pale. He was trying to figure a way out. All he knew was that he wasn't about to call the police on his friend. The rest was still a blur.

'We should assume someone else has already called the police, hearing the gunshots. Mary, you need to get rid of the rifle, finding it here would just be more damning for John.'

'I'll tell them I shot the gun', she offered her own sacrifice.

'You always wear gloves, there are no powder burns in your hands, and there are on John's. They are sure to check for those.'

John was now standing very still, with his head lowered and eyes shut tight, despair tainting his expression. The siren of a police car became audible as it approached. 'Leave now', he asked them, quietly, as the only thing left he could offer them, his sacrifice.

'Don't be an idiot', Sherlock snapped, and at the same time, Sherlock and Mary grabbed him and pushed him out of there, to his complete surprise.

'What are you doing?'

'Running from the police', his friend answered, 'with you. Taking the gun to throw it away where it won't be found and making you disappear long enough for the powder burns to be untraceable. Then all the police will have is just gunplay at your house, John, and no one will believe you could have done the shot from so far away. It's not much, but we can still make it... _if the police doesn't catch us here_.'

Before John could say another word of caution to the position it got the two of them for helping him, he was pushed along forcefully as they raced out of there.

* * *

_A/N: Well, some plans backfire. Like in real life, sometimes we just don't get a break. Good thing, he's not alone. -csf_

_Also, finally a context for the story's title at the end of last chapter. To me, it works both ways between Sherlock and John, it's an (imperfect) way of communicating their unspoken bond, and is the common ground on all the chapters. Sorry it took so long to explain, first-fic - remember? I'm proofing it as we go, hopefully it's not too convoluted and eerie sometimes, I had free reign since I didn't count on publishing/posting back then. -csf_


	20. Chapter 20

-ooo-

Sherlock was leading the nervous trio over back alleys and dingy streets. Silently, furtively, they crossed yards and kept well away from the main streets where the police might be on the lookout for them. John had to be protected, he had only executed what all three of them had the resolution to do, in legitimate self-defence of their team (was it really self-defence if they had provoked it?; John would have probably disagreed at the end of Sherlock's plan had it been successful, but he couldn't have denied it to be effective). But the police might not understand self-defence now. John would be thrown in the slander while the investigation proceeded, a good lawyer might bail him out at first, but then the other accusations of breaking and entrance and other misdemeanours would catch up with him, would throw doubt on the legitimate cases they had solved, sleazy lawyers would set the criminals they had caught free, and all the while John would be healing a twice shattered shoulder in a cold small prison cell, next door to the criminals he had contributed to incarcerate, weak and defenceless against their attacks out of vengeance. The bars holding John in would be the same holding Sherlock and Mary out, he'd be in deep danger, completely vulnerable and alone. Sherlock was sure he'd hold his own for quite a while, but at any slip up of attention, a trap could be set in motion and be the end of John, and Sherlock wouldn't have that.

The only alternative now was to keep going, solve the case, give enough time to sow doubt in the criminal investigation procedures, and wrap it up in something altogether bigger and more important so to blind the police. A cold reasoning plan had to be created and executed, but it could only happen once they've established a safe refuge.

'Sherlock, this is a cemetery!' John's exhaustion might be regressing him back to stating the obvious like an ordinary person, Sherlock noticed.

'I know', he assured him it was part of his plan. 'Come this way.'

'This is _your_ cemetery, Sherlock.'

'Mine?' he didn't quite grasp, then 'oh'. 'I suppose so, so sorry about that again. We're not here for the sightseeing. We're here for the Leaning Tomb of The Poet.'

'What is that?'

'The name the kids used to have to a very specific tomb in this cemetery of a Edwardian poet. It was believed to be haunted, which, of course, is the best way to keep people out when one is looking for a specific tomb to have has a hideout.'

'A hideout?' it seemed to be Mary's turn to repeat the obvious.

'One of my favourites.'

'How many do you have?' John asked him. He evaded a clear answer.

'A few might come in handy every once in a while.'

They were now in front of a clearly leaning to the side tomb, surely no bigger on the inside than a very small living room. Its stone walls were heavily decorated with masonry columns, arches, flowers, angels, and a variety of mosses and cob webs. At the front, the heavy rusted cast iron door seemed too heavy to give way to them, locking the tombs secret contents in a timeless suspension.

'How are we supposed to get in?' Mary verbalised.

Sherlock raised his hand to a stone rose to the left and pressed its centre hard. Immediately the cast iron door began to move aside. 'Extraordinary', John whispered, and Sherlock smiled.

'Easy. Shall we get in? There are petrol lamps to our right in a shelf...'

-ooo-

John was there, and that was good enough for Mary, at this point. John Watson, the ex-soldier, the GP doctor, the side-kick detective, the husband; he was many things to many people, but to her he was a solid reasonable loving man that made everyday life make sense again. He was the affection, the care, the loyalty at the end of a long day, that made it worthwhile to return back home. To be plain and ordinary after most of her life spent being, well, a criminal for hire by governments and rogue agents alike, sometimes playing them both at the same time. Something had made her change, a personal heavy twist departed her from what she had known as the normal life for herself. And despite all the faith John had in her heart, Mary knew how close she had been from returning to her past ways.

Fate had it that she would meet John, and instantly she was drawn to his nature. There was something in John Watson that attracted the lost souls of those who were beyond redemption, she faced, as she realized Sherlock must have felt the same about John. Today, Sherlock still wouldn't let go. He could let go. Mary would care and protect for John. Keep him from any harm in the world. Why wouldn't Sherlock let him go? He had tried once, after the wedding, with disastrous results for the both of them. They had become this unit, this partnership that found its own meaning and fuel in each other.

Despite appearances Mary wasn't too fond of this need they had for each other. But she had come to accept it instead of fighting it. John would never let Sherlock go, he cared too much for his friend's safety and well-being (he still sent Sherlock messages on a regular basis, even from his twelve hour medical professional shifts, remembering him to eat properly and throw away the remains of the oldest body parts experiments). And Sherlock had learnt to back off on the nights he could sense John and Mary were going to engage in something only the two of them were a part of (though of course Sherlock could deduce more about it the next day than John would ever be comfortable thinking about). Early on, Sherlock had once tried to interrupt one of those moments, he wanted John to leave immediately to be a helpful hand in a scientific experiment in Baker Street's kitchen. Mary had taken hold of John's phone before John had known about it and biting her lip she had texted back, without his knowledge: "He's going to be a bit tied up tonight - Mary". She wasn't even sure Sherlock had in him the ability to fully understand the sassy interpretations of the message, or the capacity to run with it. She had been wrong, she supposed, as she received back the words "Don't strain his left shoulder - SH". It had been her turn to feel awkward. She hastily deleted the conversation of John's phone, before he returned to her side, innocently. There was no tying anyone up that night for that matter, Sherlock must have deduced as much the next day and didn't bring anything up in his awkward "not good" conversations, and Mary started to resent Sherlock's uninterrupted deductions of John's life for the moments when the camaraderie trio should be a private duo. John was kept oblivious to all of this, of course. He wouldn't understand why his best friend and his wife were keeping tabs on their influence on him.

That night John Watson had become a fugitive, Mary wished they could go back to being the duo, that Sherlock would let John in her hands alone. After all, it had been Sherlock's miserable plan that had driven them to that impossible situation, and she blamed him in every glance, every look they shared.

-ooo-

Sherlock kept shooting secret worried glances at John, without his knowledge. However, it wasn't John that he was mostly concerned about, but Mary.

Sherlock and John could face anything while working together, they have built a long deep trust in each other, an intimate knowledge that could only come to people who had their lives in each other's hands over and over again to the point where the trust was full, complete, and unmentionable. If it came to it, Sherlock knew he'd give his life for John's because John's was more precious to him than the unreasonable guilt of following the self preservation instinct and having to carry on afterwards, alone. And he didn't find this reasoning remotely noble. John had done it first. Offered his life to save Sherlock's. Only priority for Sherlock before that moment ever came was to find a third option that kept them both alive and healthy, in good old fashioned common sense.

Mary, on the other hand, had never truly fitted in their unit, despite John's efforts. She was a partner in crime in every dinner or daily situation. But when confronted with action she always separated herself and flied solo. It was both her nature and her training. John kept inviting her in on the parts of their cases that presented less danger, because he believed she had chosen to leave Danger behind. He was sure she still enjoyed the process anyway and he had pushed her in on multiple occasions, when a female accomplice was called for, or even a nurse. Mary had faked reservations, as if all that was behind her. But Sherlock had read something entirely different in her body language as soon as the plan was in motion. That was her element and she had never left it. She went at it with the confidence of a regular player.

-ooo-

John was strangely pumped up. All the exhaustion and pain from the last days had disappeared all of a sudden. He wanted a plan and something to do, he wanted to get his hands dirty and fix everything, he was ready to embrace danger for the much anticipated pay-off. For a second he could recognise logically that his mind set was a dangerous one, pushing all reasonability out of the window, wanting to throw himself head first into action, but he'd brushed it off. It was about time everything got fixed. Sherlock had been targeted, Mary had been targeted, it was too much, they had messed up with the wrong soldier, those two were under his protection. John was even ashamed he had let it go so far as he did. Only solution now was to fix it. Fix it all. Take hold of a victory.

'What's the plan, Sherlock? We need a plan', he'd press his friend twice in the space of a few minutes.

Sherlock looked over at him before he'd answer. He saw John's feverishly bright eyes, the left hand that was half hidden in the fabric holding his arm to his chest was shaken by tiny jerks of electricity. This time John wasn't even hiding it, by shaking the hand or taking his other hand over it. It was like John hadn't noticed it yet, as he pierced Sherlock with a dangerous look in his eyes. All he cared about was a plan and a chance to dive in the action.

'Nothing, John. Not now, not yet. We need to rest first.' (You need to rest, to switch off.) 'We found a hiding spot, we can spend the night here, regroup, restart tomorrow with new energy.' Sherlock's voice was low and persuasive, has he took upon himself the protecting role.

'No.' John shook his head, stubbornly. 'Whatever is your plan, it's going down tonight, Sherlock, I can guarantee you that much.'

'No plan tonight, only tomorrow.'

'Don't do that to me, Sherlock.'

'Do what?'

'Keep secrets from me. I know you have a plan. You always have a plan. Hell, you always have multiple plans going on at the same time.'

Sherlock couldn't suppress a smile fast enough. 'True. But not tonight, John. You need to trust me.'

Mary tried to intervene. 'John, we all need a rest, and it's late. We're both tired. Let's give Sherlock a break as well, he did get shot just over a day ago.'

John shuddered with the realisation of the meaning of her words. She was right, Sherlock needed a break. 'Oh, yes, of course', he back down in words, but he still looked bright eyed to Sherlock and his twitching was starting to slide the arm rest fabric off its correct position.

'Let us order some take away', Sherlock suggested, picking his phone.

John frowned. 'We're taking refuge in a tomb at a cemetery. Do you really think they'll bring food out here?'

Sherlock frowned in his turn. 'They did the last time.'

Mary fought to swallow her laughter down.

'Fine...' John gave in, looking around for a place to sit. He only found ornamented coffin cases and eventually sat on the edge of one of those, trying to respect it but at the same time use them as much needed furniture.

'Pizza?' Mary suggested, not fazed at all by the current circumstances.

'With no cheese? I think I'll pass, due to John's new found allergy to lactose-based products.'

'What allergy?' John protested.

'Think I wouldn't have noticed your food choices all the time you were at Baker Street?' he looked down on his friend. John gave in with a sigh.

'It's not even important. And why would you monitor my food choices, anyway? Can't you ever shut down your detective skills?' he protested without heart.

(You were shot, John, and when you came back home you didn't eat. I monitored everything you ate, and how much of it, to make sure you kept yourself well. Isn't it what you always do for me as well?)

'Something else, then', Mary said, taking a seat as well. 'It's going to be a long night.'

Sherlock leaned over one of the other coffins and opened it. To everyone else's surprise it contained blankets, warm clothes, water bottles and a few other precious commodities.

'You really thought this place through', John complimented, despite himself, 'this is amazing, Sherlock.'

The detective pretended not to hear, but he had some trouble pretending he hadn't enjoyed the words, the amazed childlike smile, the selfless happiness it contained. John was like that, and Sherlock had never quite grown accustomed to it, and to how much he secretly enjoyed it.

'Meretricious, really.' And Mary looked surprised that Sherlock wouldn't jump at that compliment with his typical arrogance.

He took the phone up to his ear and realising there was no reception inside the thick stone walls, he stepped outside for a couple of minutes.

John was starting to calm down, drinking in the eerie but beautifully mastered atmosphere of the tomb. The petrol lamps flickering the light against the walls, the blankets warming them despite the damp thick stone walls. It was a high ceiling cramped space, but it also felt like the last refuge from the world. John could understand how Sherlock had created that space for such an occasion. Surely just for himself, but now he had opened it to John and Mary, to keep them all safe, so maybe it could really all wait until the morning. And Mary was there, sweet Mary, safe, and giving him a special look as she came closer. He kissed her briefly but sweetly, trying to reassure her that all was going to be alright.

* * *

_A/N: The writer (me) admits that she may be a bit hard hearing. Not sure if in the televised series Mycroft says the "Leading Tomb", or "Leaning Tomb", as one of Sherlock's hideouts. It was enticing anyway, so that didn't keep me from elaborating on it. Figured the leading tomb can also be leaning.__ -csf_


	21. Chapter 21

-ooo-

When Sherlock pushed open the heavy cast iron door to return to the inside of the leaning tomb, after he placed the food order through his phone, he found John slumped, sitting over the coffin against the wall, deep asleep. Mary was leaning over him and jolted as she realized Sherlock had returned. A small gesture of her left hand could have gone unnoticed to anyone else, but not to the consulting detective. In an instant he understood she was hiding something up her sleeve. With one look at his sleeping friend the detective understood.

'How long have you been doing that?' he asked quietly, but Sherlock couldn't quite hide the tension in his throat, he was uncomfortable.

'Doing what?' she asked back.

'Drugging him so he can sleep the night peacefully.'

'I'm a nurse, Sherlock, I know what I'm doing', she defended.

'I asked you how long', he wouldn't let go.

'It's just sometimes. I've got these sleeping pills he's once been prescribed, and he needed to rest. This is easier than arguing.'

'You slipped them into his water bottle without his knowledge.' Sherlock took a step forward and grasped her wrist. He forced the tablet off her hand, all the while John was knocked out for the night.

'So, how was it this time? You kissed him to distract his attention from the water bottle?' She kept silent, watching him, as Sherlock checked John's vitals. 'It's probably been going a while now, but you haven't done this in Baker Street. You figured I would have noticed the drugged induced sleep... Do you really think this is for his safety, Mary?'

'I love him', she defended immediately.

'It's easier to hurt someone you love than someone you don't.'

She swallowed hard. 'I was afraid he'd go out there and get himself in trouble, you saw it too, didn't you? He had that resolution in his eyes, to keep us safe, and I needed to keep him safe.'

'Help me', Sherlock directed, sliding his healthy arm on his friend's back, grabbing him and pushing him gently over so he'd lie down on the wooden surface more comfortably.

Mary got a blanket spread over John, his breathing was deep but mechanic. She then unbuttoned the collar of his shirt to check the shoulder wound under the bandages. They were loving, but calculated gestures, commanding and dominating, as Mary stood stooped over her unconscious husband, and Sherlock had stepped back to watch them.

'At the first hospital', she stated to strike a conversation, 'they weren't very good were they? The oldest of these are double stitches, no one does those anymore...'

(An army doctor does, overseas.) Sherlock didn't explain, not this time. He realized that he wasn't letting Mary in anytime soon, her actions were a cold betray of John's confidence over and over again. A lopsided love that aggravated Sherlock the most because he would have done the same as a friend, long ago. But Mary was John's wife, and in that position he trusted her in a way that made her actions the more damaging. He didn't deserve that betrayal of confidence, not again, no matter how well intentioned her actions may have been. Sherlock regretted he couldn't wake John up and come clean about all he had witnessed. It wasn't the time or the place. Their combined efforts needed to be focused on saving John Watson right now.

-ooo-

'Why am I drinking a second cup of coffee, and why is Mary snoring?'

Those were the strange questions that first permeated John's sleepy brain as Sherlock kept insisting for John to stay awake and to discuss a plan of action. The first petrol lamps had been replaced with newer ones as the night outside the tomb had given way to the first lights of dawn.

'Must I be expected to answer your every question, John?' Sherlock diverted for the moment.

'I am sooo sleepy right now, it's not even funny...' he giggled before he could stop himself. Sherlock gave him an eye roll but he was smiling as well. John was one of the strongest persons he knew, but he also carried a lot of sad devastation inside. It was hardly visible unless you knew him well. Mrs H saw it and she worried, Greg saw it and he sympathised, Molly had only just begun to notice it sometimes. To see John lower his guard for a brief second and just giggle innocently had surprisingly become one of his friend's motives for joy. How would have he responded had Sherlock told him he had used Mary's own recipe on herself as a petty little time-out vengeance?... Yeah, he'd keep it a secret for now.

'Well, I'm a fugitive', John recovered. 'But you're not, Sherlock, and you have a case to solve, so crack on with it. I'll just stay here in your guest house, I promise I won't disturb the other guests tucked away in their "boxes", and hopefully you can get me out of here some time soon.'

'Really?' Sherlock tilted his head sideways.

'What?'

'You think I'd leave?'

'I know how it's all about the cases for you, it's your... _thing_.'

'John, listen to me: you're my people.'

'You mean you're not leaving?'

'I'm not leaving, John. Can you get that once and for all? It would really save us some time.'

'Why?' John asked slowly and deliberately, sounding almost suspicious.

'Well, time is a resource and though I grant you it looks like we have plenty of it right now, it's still sort of annoying (annoying in a good way!) to have to repeat myself when...'

'I mean: why do you stay? This is not your _thing_. You solve puzzles, it's all about the mental games. Why help me evade justice? What's in it for you?' John's blue eyes were troubled as he faced his friend's gaze with honesty.

'I told you. I will not leave you behind. It's not all about the cases, you got that wrong. Now, even though I understand this is going to be mixed messages, having said that, we really need to talk about the case and solve it.'

'Sherlock...'

The detective sighed. 'Yes, John...' In front of him, his friend was definitely fully awake at this point and was about to say _thanks_, he could see it. 'Don't say it out loud, please.'

'Why not? Why do we hardly do it?' (Say "Thank you" to one another.)

'Because then it becomes a social obligation, and somehow it fits into a category of politeness and it's none of that to begin with. I do it because you'd have done it to, and so it's even from the start. Do you understand?'

John nodded. Sherlock was like that. Advert to social conventions, mostly because he seemed to believe that they subverted the honest process that had set them in motion. John could live with that. Somehow, it was starting to make some sense to him too. Sherlock's madness was permeating into him.

-ooo-

Sherlock eventually phoned Detective Inspector Greg Lestrade at Scotland Yard. What he said to him was polite and distant, assuring the fine officer that his blogger was nowhere to be found and that he'd cooperate fully with the investigations, naming Dr. Watson's whereabouts as soon as he knew them. He also learnt that Mary's statement was wanted for routine purposes, since it was her husband that a neighbour seemed to have been able to describe to a T, holding a steely gun by the window.

All the while this conversation was being held, another was being had by texts, of course. Greg used his personal phone as he talked over on the land line, and Sherlock had the nerve to use John's phone as a backup for the texts.

_Are you guys alright?_

Yes. How bad is it? –SH

_Not good at all. Witness places John there, firing a kill shot._

_The body is gone but there is too much blood. Have to treat it as a homicide._

_It wasn't you taking it, right?_

Obviously not. I'm not into designing crime scenes, just studying them. –SH

_Had to ask. What the hell went wrong, Sherlock?_

One of my pawns misplaced itself and check mate. –SH

I'm not letting John go down for this. –SH

_I'm doing what I can, but my hands are tied. Tell John I'm doing what I can._

He knows that, Greg. –SH

_Tell him anyway. And keep him safe and invisible for now._

Fine. I'll bring you something from Russia. Mycroft is faking me there. –SH

_Next time choose some place warmer._

You talk to Mycroft then. –SH

As both communications came to a halt, Sherlock was standing outside the leaning tomb, in a brisk cold morning. The moist air he had spoken had come out of his mouth in swirls. He was worried. He still hadn't a good plan, just a basic plan, and basic wasn't good enough lately.

Breakfast, he needed to get John breakfast, he thought, taking Greg's pleas of tending to John to heart. He couldn't keep ordering food around to a cemetery though, it would raise inevitable suspicions. And he despised the idea of abandoning the still highly volatile ex-soldier to his thoughts, he'd might get all selfless again and just turn himself in.

Sherlock sighed, letting all that moist foggy air out at once, and it felt painful to breathe it all that air back in at once, the cold and brisk grasping his insides, somehow making his bullet graze hurt because of it. He shook his head, trying to make it go away. He wasn't the only one in pain. John was in pain too. And now they were on their own, there would be no more pain killers for either of them. Back to basics, the least amount of stuff necessary, on the road and on the run. Could Sherlock take that pain? Yes, quite bearable as long as his arm kept still. But could John? His bullet had done far more damage to an already fragile area. Sherlock only hoped so, because his plan was a basic plan, not a good plan. He still didn't have a good plan, let alone a great one.

-ooo-

'Goodbye, Mary', John whispered audibly in her ear as they embraced tight. Sherlock diverted his gaze. Those were the things that you never say meaningfully out loud. If those turn out being the last words spoken, then they assume devastating proportions, and god knows Sherlock had regretted the one time he had broken this rule of his, because he knew how time had made them even more devastating.

But John wasn't thinking of such things, only Sherlock. So John kept adding 'Please be careful out there, it won't be for long.' She nodded, teary eyed. 'I'm so glad you've agreed to take Mycroft's offer of getting off grid. He's a snotty jerk, but you can trust him, after all he's the damned British Services and a Holmes by nature.' Behind them, Sherlock was not at all fazed by the earlier classification of his brother.

'Sherlock persuaded me, in the end', she admitted, in factual words but a very biased recount. He had very coldly blackmailed her to be precise. Three people on the run were just one too many. And he was probably still upset about the sleeping pills incident.

John lowered his voice even more. 'Please forgive me I wasn't able to keep you safe, Mary. Please forgive me for failing you.'

She pushed him tighter to her body, feeling guilty. _He was blaming himself for leaving her_, he didn't know (he couldn't know, she wouldn't tell him) that she was the primary target, she was the one that brought all that onto them. That first night he had been shot at Baker Street, he had been on the phone with her, and someone had listened in on that conversation, probably bugging her phone. That's how they knew where he was going to be. That ridiculous discussion about the sofa and his back. And the window crashing at Molly's lab? He had just texted her after leaving the police station, because she was worried about him, and he told her where they were going next. How could he blame himself for what she had brought upon him and Sherlock?

'Don't worry about me, I'm not their target, John, they'll leave me alone', she lied, masterfully done. Calm, nurturing, because she truly cared for him, and if telling him the truth wasn't an option, then she'd lie her way through appeasing him. He nodded, with a sweet expression in his eyes (honestly, he had probably forgotten the audience at this point, or for once he didn't care).

'All will be okay soon', he promised her before he let her go.

Mary hugged Sherlock quickly but sweetly, before pushing the door open to go away. 'Goodbye to you too, Sherlock.' (But she knew quite well his habits.)

'Goodbye, Mary.' (He knew she knew them.)

John didn't notice, pulling himself straight and clearing his throat as if it could clear the vulnerability off his system as well.

'And the rest of your plan, Sherlock?' he asked, keeping his back to his friend to hide his expressions at the moment.

'It's starting right now, John', he offered him action, because action was, at that point in time, the only thing that could seemingly mend John's heart and Sherlock knew him, because he knew him only too well.

-ooo-

John Watson had common features, apparently. Because as he walked the streets with Sherlock Holmes, every once in a while people seemed to recognise the detective and never him. Which in this case was particularly fortunate, being a fugitive from the police and all.

'I don't particularly like hats and it feels like a silly disguise', he vented.

His friend smirked. 'Helps with the cctv, it's just an added precaution. There is still only a Look Out notice on John Hamish Watson, you haven't been placed in the Terrorists List... I'd have recommended a haircut, but it's already too short. Or hair die, but you're painfully too blondish to get away with black hair. A wig, on the other hand, would...'

John cut him off, he knew he had deserved it because he had been complaining: 'Actually, a hat is just fine, now I come to think of it.'

'Great then.'

'You might want to wear a hat too.'

'Why?' he struggled to follow John's reasoning.

'Because you're with me.'

'No one is looking for me. And also you're always with several different people, John.'

'True, but you are almost only ever with me, Sherlock. How long till someone figures out that if they see you, and you're not alone, the guy in the funny hat must be me?'

'It's not a funny hat, it's a felt hat. It's... what I could find, unless you wanted the darned deerstalker.'

'No, no, just fine with this hat, on second thought.'

They kept walking, a few silent steps, before John noticed: 'I didn't mean you don't have other friends, Sherlock, because obviously you do, you know that...'

'I know what you meant. I'm usually found alone, I get that.' There was no hurt in his voice, he was stating a fact clearly. John still felt like he had crossed a line.

'And if you wanted, there are a lot of people who'd like to go to places with you, you know that.'

'Of course I do.'

'I've just always assumed you preferred to be alone most of the time.'

'Really?' This time Sherlock actually looked at him.

'You do tend to tell people not to speak or move because they are boring when doing so.'

'Yes, I see... Well, _but they are_, John!' he complained and John couldn't hide a grin.

'Thank you very much!' John replied light-hearted.

'What do you mean? I don't say that _about you_, John.'

'You don't?' he was actually taken by surprise. Sherlock smiled at his confusion, so apparent in his face. John never observed scientifically, he was really very bad at that, as Mycroft had been so fast to point out the first time they talked about John Watson. As much as he wasn't that great at deducting, John was just the person that Sherlock had come to find out he needed by his side in a case. And Sherlock wouldn't have traded him for anyone else with better observational skills.

'Police car up the street, tie your shoe and stay behind a few paces', Sherlock directed briefly. John would follow the lead promptly, and the police car would roll by them with only a faint recognition of Sherlock from the officers inside.

'You might want', Sherlock restarted the conversation when John rejoined him, 'to try to walk more loosely, John.'

John frowned in confusion. 'What do you mean?'

'We're not in the army, John.'

'I know _that'_, John failed to grasp, 'so?'

'The hands behind your back thing, right now?'

'Ah.'

'And are you sure you can use your left arm freely again?'

'I'll be careful', John answered, placing his hands on his coat pockets.

'And you know, you can relax your posture a bit, John.'

'What do you mean?' he was confused again.

Sherlock smiled. 'Never mind.'

'Look here, if you want to tell me something, tell it to my face and...' He stopped short, Sherlock was actually giggling at him. And John giggled too. John had a misfortunate slip earlier and Sherlock had paid him right back. The funny thing was all those characteristics were painfully true. 'Fine... And where are we going, again?'

'To a better hide-out, John. To the Machine Room Under the Bridge.'

'Doesn't sound very top-secret. Which bridge is that?'

'That's the top-secret part, John. No one will ever find us there.'

'I'm flattered', John said after a few seconds of silence.

'Told you: you're my people, John.'

'You don't need to feel that you have to do this just because I told you a story about my time in Afghanistan.'

'Don't be an idiot, it doesn't suit you, John.'

This time John kept quiet much longer.


	22. Chapter 22

-ooo-

The clanks and puffs of the heavy steel machinery still seemed to dominate the small space even as they had been halted for decades. The history and nature of the mechanical structured place was painfully beautiful and strained in every joint, rod, wheel and pillar at the machine room. The steel itself had lost its shine, somewhat rusted now, and in its prime time had probably saturated the room with a stench of lubricant oil and hot water steam. It was a small room under the first arch of the cast iron bridge over the Thames, a cubical room with only one window, high up on the far wall, overlooking the river waters. At a corner of the room stood a heavy oak desk and a chair, with a petrol lamp on it and a vintage typewriter, left forgotten by the last caretaker of the bridges' hydraulics, before it had been completely transformed by electrical devices, rendering that room and the machinery within useless.

'You really seem to know the best places in town', John said, as he paced the room, peeking at the old curiosities, his hands behind his back again and he didn't even know it.

'It will get cold at night. There are blankets in a small cabinet on that corner. And some canned food too... Can you sleep on the floor, John?'

He looked up, confused. 'Of course I can.'

'What would your doctor say to it?' Sherlock circled his previous question.

'I would hardly listen', John answered with a fake smile designed to appease his friend. 'Do you have a bed in here somewhere to yourself?'

'No, it's the same situation for the two of us.'

John pressed his lips tight to a very thin line, uncomfortable with his own perceived selfishness. After all, he was the one that got Sherlock there, with a very recent firearm wound.

'The police didn't find a body, John.'

He turned back around slowly.

'You mean I missed?' his voice was strained.

'I wish I could tell you that, it would sort it all out... There was too much blood on the scene.'

'Maybe he got out on his own, despite being hurt.'

Sherlock shook his head. 'Unlikely, John. It just means that there were two people there.'

'Which did I hit?' he worried. Sherlock gave him a heavy stare.

'The one that was shooting back.'

'How would you know?'

'You are that good as a shooter. You had very little to go on. The street outside was dark except for a lamplight that blinded your view of the empty house across. There was no way you should have been able to calculate that shot based only on the outside.'

'Then how did I?' he doubted himself. His adrenaline high that night had blurred his memories of the events.

'Experience and training kicked in. You saw the bullet hole on the closet door and the one on the window pane. A straight line gave you trajectory. The knowledge on the bullet type confirmed the distance it had travelled from. If it had been further it would have lost speed and gathered more distortion around its axis. You knew all this, and you knew it instantly.' In front of him, John's expression was heavy. Sherlock still insisted. 'As you entered the room and saw the bullet's trajectory, you also saw that Mary was within range of a new shot. You ran to the window and placed yourself in front of the glass hole. If another shot had been fired right then, it had no angle to shot anyone else in the room but you, John. You did that to cover Mary, even me. Do you remember that? Adrenaline can be a powerful amnesiac.' John looked up to Sherlock but he didn't answer. 'You aligned your handgun with the bullet's trajectory and pulled the trigger. I can assure you John, you were very precise. I saw it all happen.'

'Are you sure? It was very fast', there was a sense of urgency in his words, now. How much it mattered to John that if he was a criminal, that he'd be for the right reasons, the right target.

'It was very fast, you are right. In a second you had shot the bullet. Then you stood there, immobile, frozen, and honestly it took you a few seconds before you were breathing again and had lowered your gun. I could see your angles perfectly, John. But I don't know where your mind goes when you fire a crack shot like that. I've seen it before. Your mind goes somewhere else.'

'It's probably the adrenaline kick.'

'Actually, I think it happens every time, and that you remember every time you had such a shot perfectly. I think you remember them all when you fire like that. I think you could count and name every single one of those deadly shots ever since the you went to war, the ones you made it and the ones you failed.'

'Get out of my head', John snapped back, bitterly, stopping Sherlock's words flow. 'You wouldn't want to be in there', he added with a self-loathing smile.

Sherlock broke eye contact, there was a tinge of sadness in his eyes but mostly he remained apparently emotionless. He could see John struggling for privacy. Every single shot came with a price. He blamed himself for each one and carried them darkly inside himself. It was his dual nature. The soldier and the doctor. The harmer and the healer. The struggle inside him made him hate himself, and that was painfully evident in every line of his face and his body as he stood in front of Sherlock.

'I'm sure you didn't hit the wrong person. Please stop imagining that you hit some random innocent person in the other side. If that had happened, the shooter would hardly had the trouble of taking the body with him. No, you hit the shooter, fatally or not, and someone else, maybe the mastermind, got him out of there. So the odds are that whoever you shot actually got out of there alive, though seriously injured. In such an event he must have been taken to a hospital, and that's where our investigation will start, John.'

He shook his head, immobile still. 'You can't deceive me, Sherlock. I know you too well now, and I've learnt your methods... There was too much blood, Greg said so. It's not hospitals we want, it's morgues.'

'Maybe someone else got hurt in that apartment, in a fight. That would account for the extra blood. We can't eliminate any possibility yet', Sherlock offered a weak theory and he knew it was so.

'Now you're not even making an effort', John snapped. 'Hurt enough to bleed a lot and strong enough to carry the body out...' John depreciated, again with that same self-hurting smile.

Sherlock sighed. John was no ordinary man, and his use of logic was getting fine tuned to the point after all those years in crime scenes.

Then Sherlock took a deep breath.

'Wait! What did you just say? Getting out. The police doesn't know it, they hadn't arrived yet, but we do, we were there, John. No one left that place. You are a genius, John! You pointed that out specifically right then and I didn't realize it meant something, it means a lot... How did they get out before the police got there, John?'

John was still immobile and his eyes were dark, but Sherlock wasn't paying attention to that anymore. A new question, a new doubt, and he was rolling in deep again, full of bursting energy and adrenaline. A locked room mystery. Undoubtedly, Sherlock's favourite type of mystery. He had to bite down his tongue not to say "thank you" to John for that mystery. Good thing he didn't like saying "thank you"s too, John wouldn't have appreciated his gratitude at that point. Of course, if someone ever understood Sherlock's faux pass was John, somehow he always seemed to. But not at that moment in time. At that time, the twitch on the corner of John's mouth was of disgust and if Sherlock had been more attentive he'd have realized that John was directing it to himself. And he'd try to reach out to John. Probably by logic. But then John was already sure Sherlock could never tell him something that could make it all right. For John there was a serious doubt. Had he hit the right person? And the acknowledgement that he could have failed to do so was taxing him very hard. Because that was the sort of person that John was. A Right and Wrong person, and there was rarely an in-between.

-ooo-

As much as Sherlock felt uncomfortable leaving John behind, failing to take actions would not have brought them closer to an ending on that situation. That was how he had come to find himself separated from John and facing his brother, Mycroft, in the hope of gathering an ally in him. Their conversation was however punctuated with the usual distance and manoeuvring that was characteristic to their understandings. They sat facing one another in Mycroft's concrete bunker of an office, in a secret location.

'It's unfortunate, but this is not your battle, Sherlock', Mycroft reminded him in a warning tone of voice.

'John's my client', Sherlock pointed out. Not that he saw him like that, but hopefully Mycroft could understand the detective-client relationship more easily than a friendship one. Still, Mycroft tilted his head and raised a brow, seeing right through the nomenclature.

'There is nothing I can do. I must obey the law at all times and, for all accounts, Dr. Watson is indeed a murderer. If you are so invested in the Good, and Justice and all those nice things, then you shouldn't be siding with him in the first place.'

'He was protecting his wife's life.' Sherlock leaned forward, his voice was tense.

'Turns out your _friend_ has quite a shot. All would have been simpler if he had missed. And if he hadn't brought illegally a military gun back to London. What did he need it for, by the way? You can see all of this hardly paints the picture of an innocent man?'

'Mycroft...'

'Sherlock, even though I enjoy myself hearing you come to me for aid, I cannot give you any. There is nothing I can do for John Watson. I vehemently suggest he turns himself in and gets a plea bargain for cooperation.'

'No!' Sherlock actually raised his voice, his impatience rapidly turning to despair. Mycroft was not completely impassive to his brother pain, but he remained adamant that there was nothing he could do.

'Why not?' Mycroft shrugged his shoulders. 'It's his best option. Even a man like him can surely see it.'

'He saw it', Sherlock recognised. Mycroft pondered it.

'Ah, yes, the soldier, of course, what was I thinking.'

'I won't let him.'

'Can you really stop him, Sherlock? And why would you do that?'

'He's a war hero, I won't see him being degraded like that.'

'You don't believe in wars and politics, Sherlock', his brother reminded him.

'No, but I now believe in heroes.'

'Don't be stupid, heroes don't exist and if they did John Watson would hardly qualify for one.'

Sherlock smiled coldly as the best offense he could master to his cold-hearted brother. (John already is a hero.)

-ooo-

'Thank you, Molly', John's smile was genuine and warm, as he took from her a paper bag full of stuff she had got for them. He was grateful she was up for it, he was now officially evaded from the police and would be arrested on the spot if found. The situation was getting worse by the hour and Molly's kind gesture was no small token of bravery.

'You've got a nice place here', she complemented, looking around. 'It was Sherlock's idea, I suppose.'

'Definitely his doing', John agreed, feeling lucky. As he was reaching into the bag he stopped short and winced. He had used the wrong arm, he had forgotten, stupidly forgotten the obvious. He took a seat by the old desk, resting the bag in front of him.

'I'll call Sherlock', Molly offered at once, reaching for her phone and he hardly had the time to stop her.

'No need, it's all gone, now, just a silly movement, that's all.'

'John, I'd find it easier to believe that if you weren't looking so run down.'

'Didn't sleep well, that's all, and I'm not doing much today anyway. It's safer if I just stay here, hiding... _Hiding_...' his gaze was lost and his mouth twisted in disgust. He was a fugitive, a criminal, like the ones they used to chase.

Molly lowered herself to the table separating them, so she'd be forced into his eye sight. John seemed surprised by her intensity. 'John, Sherlock is worried about you.'

'Maybe I should just give up. I'm dragging his name down.'

John knew Molly cared so much for Sherlock, she could put some sense in John's head, talk him into doing the right thing, and John tried to plead it out of her so he could finally give up.

'If you do that he'll be all alone, John. He can't be all alone. It's _not_ _good_ for him, John.'

'He's not alone anymore. He's got a lot of people who care for him and put up with his crap.'

She copied his smile to be polite.

'You know it's not the same. You are the only person he opens up to', Molly confided.

'I fear not. He doesn't', John corrected her.

'He told me that himself.'

'He must have been working some angle.'

'He wasn't. It was just after St. Barts.' John had to look away. 'He told me you were the only one who understood him.'

'I seriously don't. He keeps surprising me.'

She smiled. 'No one else can say that. Do you see what I mean?'

He looked up to her. 'This is not the right thing, I'm not doing the right thing.'

'I'm giving you a reason not to do the right thing.'

This time John paused.

'You are amazing, Molly.'

She smiled awkwardly.

-ooo-

Sherlock Holmes hated to take the bus, honestly. And he could hardly explain why. Either the proximity of all those people crammed into a small space shaking over wheels or the excess stimulus they brought him, it overwhelmed him every time.

A doctor (the slight smell of chlorine and anaesthetics that was similar to John's) with a gambling problem (all the ink marks on his fingers from the small complementary pens at the betting's office) and deep in debt (the shoes were expensive but over-worn and the right shoe let rain water in through the front now, but hadn't been repaired or replaced) came to sit by his side on the bench. A short uncomfortable glance at Sherlock's open and running computer and he'd pretend to ignore his curiosity. All the better, since the computer had been passed on by Mycroft and Sherlock was frantically searching the cctv footage from the night before, trying to identify the escape of the shooter from the apartment across the Watson's house. Unfortunately, John had picked the suburbs, overcompensating his need to feel adequate and average. The suburbs had less cctv and less lighting in the streets, making Sherlock's job harder.

Nothing there. Sherlock closed the lid shut harshly over the keyboard and the gambling doctor glanced sideways. Sherlock hated busses so much. But he was doing it for John. So no one could trace a cab with Sherlock Holmes in it to John's location. And for the same reason he couldn't tell the woman behind him that her husband was cheating on her, to the young couple in the front to stop doing drugs, to the man across them that there was no point on going drunk that night (he still would) and to the other guy to restart taking his heart medication, it was stupid to stop it due to an infatuation with a way younger woman.

Sherlock shut his eyes tight, trying hard not to analyse the whole of the top deck of the bus.


	23. Chapter 23

-ooo-

Sherlock woke up with a low humming noise that he couldn't quite make sense of in his almost vigil state. As he raised himself slightly from the blanket over the cold hard floor, he located the origin at once. Hurled up in the corner, the smaller statured figure was breathing shallowly, and the humming was actually more of a low pitched long moan that erupted from the sleeping man. John was in pain. Still sleeping, probably almost half awake, he was enduring through the circumstances of their make shift beds. The cold damp of the river and stone piercing through his shattered and rebuilt bones in the shoulder (who knew, probably a couple of others he kept silenced about as well) and the hard unforgiving mattress they had improvised of a folded blanket, Sherlock would have guessed to be the main problems.

Slowly, regretfully, Sherlock pulled himself down again, trying to force the sound off his mind. He couldn't. He tried hating on his friend, if he didn't really care for him, he'd fall right back asleep. John had said Sherlock was always alone, that no one was ever with Sherlock... What was he? Four years old on a tantrum? John had slipped with the truth because he worried about Sherlock, and it had hardly hurt Sherlock to hear it out loud from someone he knew cared for him.

Sherlock pulled himself up again, this time completely up. In a few silent steps he walked over to John. As his fingertips touched the cold outline of his friend, was touch was gentle, trying not to disturb him. He grabbed his shoulders carefully and rolled him over gently to the other side. The humming diminished, the breathing pattern fell deeper. It seemed to have done the trick. With a gentle smile that the darkness would never uncover, Sherlock returned to his make believe bed and lay back down. The blankets were now cold again, but they felt indefinitely more comfortable. Sherlock would fall asleep easily now.

-ooo-

Morning light had been flooding the Machine Room from the window over the river course for hours. In a mutual decision, Sherlock had left their safe house to get some food for the both of them, taking his time in order to assure himself he wasn't being followed. John had stayed behind, growing impatient and restless, until he had forced himself to sit down by the lonely table. There he'd find the rest of the paper bag treasures that Molly had provided them, and finally he had noticed among the things a newspaper from the day before. He devoted his energy to the old stale news.

'I hate, hate busses', Sherlock proclaimed as he entered the Machine Room under the Bridge, startling John as he was reading. 'Why do people need to be so ordinary?' he'd even complain.

John faked a smile. 'You need to find someone else to ask that to.'

'Why?' Sherlock asked in confusion.

'I fear I may be one of those specimens you hate.' He folded the newspaper to change the page. Then he added: 'Or maybe not so ordinary anymore, Sherlock. I made it to the London news section.'

Sherlock faced John more carefully. 'You knew it was bound to happen.' But he could see in the other's face that the thought hadn't occurred. The result being that comprehension of his public image at this point was downing on the man who struggled so hard to be ordinary, to lead a boring existence, contradicting his true nature. For all the madness that seemed to have made its home in Sherlock, he had never really fought to be average, boring, predictable, invisible, socially fitted to the norm. John, on the other hand, cared about all those things, and all again they were crashing around him. If only he'd accept himself more freely, and surpass that Right & Wrong view of the world, maybe he wouldn't be so shocked now, thought Sherlock.

'I hope they have the decency of mentioning me in there', Sherlock proclaimed to divert John's attention.

'Hope not, you don't need to be dragged into this mess... _Yes, they do_. Look, Sherlock', he faced his friend with honest deep blue eyes, 'I'm sorry.'

'What for?' Sherlock acted like he didn't understand. John had to fight back a bout of bad mood that came on as a reflex.

'This doesn't look good on you. The papers are partnering you with a... deranged hit man for hire.'

'Cool', Sherlock actually smiled.

'It's not good for your business.'

'I have some money set aside.'

'Yeah, but could you live with less head puzzles? They are never enough for you. What am I doing to you?'

'It would actually bring in more clients if you didn't push that morality clause all the time, John...'

'I insist on it.'

'I don't need more clients, I need good cases and right now you're the best client I've got.'

'As a client I might have broken that morality clause, don't you see?'

'It's alright, I don't insist on it.'

'Sherlock...'

'John, must I be repeating myself?'

They both silenced themselves, stubbornly.

The small door to the Machine Room was burst open all of a sudden, and they were confronted by a couple of armed man carrying their guns drawn. Sherlock froze in reaction, John got up to face them.

The first bullet shattered the window immediately arresting all the attention in the room. They stood immobile, facing the two men.

Sherlock looked at the guns pointed at them with a cold reasoning disdain. Behind him John had a dangerous controlled expression and a hint of an evil smile.

'What do you want?' Sherlock broke the silence. John kept absolutely quiet, giving Sherlock the lead.

The man gestured angrily with his gun. They wanted Sherlock and John to be tied down. The second man pocketed his gun and got a rope to tie Sherlock's hands together as the first kept up the vigilance. Sherlock was not a quiet hostage.

'Military background, probably dishonourable discharge, this is interesting...' he started all at once, like he couldn't help himself (and he knew he couldn't, yet he hadn't chosen to do it silently). 'And your friend here... Mercenary for hire, at least two other allegiances before. "Just one"? No, I shouldn't think so, definitely two...'

The first man glanced at the second. That was what the hostages were expecting, an instant of distraction. John tried to reach out for the gun on the second man's pocket but got hit with a punch and the gun he had grasped got tossed through the air, sliding further away in the room. John launched forward to get it and so did the man who had lost it.

Sherlock drew a left hook on the armed man in front of him as he tried to lock the aim on John.

Meanwhile John had reached the gun first. He took it up in his hands to the man closely following behind. With the gun in his hand, John hesitated in firing it for a split second, just enough to let the opportunity slide off his grasp.

'Sherlock, behind you!' he shouted the warning. Immediately he had to duck from a bullet that crashed on the wall just behind him.

'John!' Sherlock yelled to get his attention. 'That boat!' he pointed.

John followed the direction of his friend's gesture. There was a small private boat floating on the centre of the muddy river. What with that boat? Was it a rescue boat? Were they supposed to swim towards it?

The first bullet from the boat almost hit the side of his head. The boat was enemy territory and held more danger. John knew he only had a few seconds before the rifle's aim was again locked on him after the kick recoil of the first shot. He looked over at Sherlock and they crossed gazes.

With his best right hand hook John shoved the man in front of him aside and ran towards Sherlock's enemy, grabbing his gun by the barrel to diverge its aim long enough for Sherlock to release his hands from the ropes. The gun's barrel was hot and smelled of burnt gunpowder, and slowly was making its way to John. Sherlock stopped its movement with a powerful punch at the man holding it. Unfortunately with the wrong hand. He immediately held on to his hurt arm, in pain. John glanced over his shoulder, there was no more time. The other man was reaching for his lost gun on the floor. He pushed Sherlock with him on one of the craziest decisions he'd ever make. In a couple of seconds he's pushing Sherlock over the edge of the shattered window onto the river and following him in a similar jump.

The impact with the freezing water was painful and made them loose their breaths at once, filing their lungs instead with a bit of cold icy water. The taste of it was dreadful, the visibility null, its weight on their clothes was dragging them down and the currants pulling them mid stream.

'Come here, you clot...'

It took less than two seconds for John to notice that Sherlock was less proficient at swimming than himself. Probably the arm wound had something to do with it, but John was way too practical to ponder the motives. In two powerful strokes he reached his friend, grabbed him securely, and then pushed back to shore against the currant.

The river currants created whirlwinds and missteps that were making it difficult for the pair to reach the shore despite their combined efforts. Lucky in a way, because it allowed them to be drifted downstream faster than their enemies could follow them. But now the cold was slumbering Sherlock's moves and John could feel him shaking uncontrollably under the grasp of his arm. With a deep committed breath, John hugged tighter and pushed through on stronger strokes that seemed to be making him dizzy every time. This went on for dragging seconds until eventually his hand hit land. He got himself up in the sandy shore of some dump beach and pushed Sherlock, dragging him under the arms to firm land. He gently let him down on the ground and checked him. He was breathing, and his eyes were open, just somewhat dazed. John smiled, relieved. He got up, looking around. As the adrenaline was fading all came back to him at once. The powerful pain in his shoulder almost broke him in half, and as the exhaustion caught up in his throat he had to cough in bursts. That contributed to the light-headedness and before he knew it his knees had collapsed. He first hit the ground with his knees, the rest of him went down as a plank next. He lost consciousness before he could appreciate the solid ground on which he landed.

-ooo-

John woke up with a jolt, as if in his memory all that remained latent was the danger and finally instinct had kicked in. Easily he'd recognise that his surroundings had changed so inevitably some time had elapsed. He tried to make sense of what he saw all around him. It was a freakish old circus tent, traditional (old or vintage inspired?) and out of our times. The two coloured fabric hanging overhead in large stripes hugging an iron frame was tightened in place by ropes. He was lying on the dirt floor of a circular arena with moist sand, encased by a small rail to separate a few chairs and benches. Workmen were coming in and out bringing chairs. Mismatched old chairs, aligned with attention to detail by careful respectful hands.

Then he noticed that sitting down on the ground beside him (sharing the same thick velvet with mould stains as it were) was Sherlock, watching him recover attentively. John smiled without even realizing he was doing it.

'How the hell did I get here, Sherlock?'

Sherlock smiled too, at the sound of his course voice.

'The Strong Man brought you in... You did leave him a bit out of breath so I wouldn't put much trust on that inscription of two hundred pounds on his dumbbells...'

John was crumpling himself in two, slowly, still lying in the ground.

'What in the world...?'

'Your stitches reopened. Well, not all of them, some. By now you're going to end up with a very ugly scar.'

'It's okay...' he took his hand to his shoulder trying to feel it over the fabric.

'Who...? Did you...?'

'Not my area, really. One of the Tattooed Head to Toes Twins thought it was her area though. She did a good job, too.'

John was starting to have the idea that nothing of that was real, he was in some drugs induced farfetched dream on some hospital bed.

'Why does it smell so much of alcohol in here? And why can't I think properly? Am I drunk?'

'Not really. We did use a liquor bottle as a disinfectant on your wound. Your observing skills are as usual, John. You are, however, a little feverish, that might account for the reasoning part you mentioned.'

'How did I get here?'

'I told you. The Strong...'

'No, I mean... Is this another one of your hideouts?'

Sherlock pondered his answer for a second. 'Not really, but they owed me a favour and they'll let us stay in one of the tents for the night. It's not like we can go back to the bridge after what happened.'

'You never cease to amaze me, Sherlock.'

'I would hate to see that happen.' He replied honestly.

John looked all around again as he took his fingers up to his shoulder wound. The pain flash almost knocked tears off his eyes. No bandage, just the rough edges of skin and stitches exposed. Who had gone all Frankenstein on him? Certainly not a qualified professional. 'I'd like a mirror to check this out. Don't want to hurt anyone's feelings but...'

Sherlock considered: 'Probably best. One of those Tattooed Twins is very nearsighted and I could have mistaken them... Stay here, I'll get you something...'

'Sherlock', he stopped him from leaving.

'What else do you need?'

But it wasn't that. 'Are you okay? You were frozen by the time you got to shore.'

Their clothes had for the most part dried already on their own, a long time had passed even if not at John's grasp. '"Frozen" is not a scientifically accurate description of temperature, John.'

'Shut up.'

'I suspect that you're voicing the opposite of what you really intended at this point, based on the years I know you. Again, if you were to make an effort to be more accurate, John, you'd find that...'

John rolled his eyes. Scientifically Blunt Sherlock was a reflex of what had happened in the Machine Room and the river. The best he could do for his friend was to let him crusade for scientific speech for a while, as a way to vent out.

'Just get me a hand mirror when you get a minute to spare.'

'I'm not sure I'd take a minute, and I suppose you're using a generic notion of a minute as a vague timing and not really a chronological sixty seconds time frame.'

'Brilliant', John was sarcastic.

'Really?' Sherlock wanted to know, with a sort of innocence. John smiled, his eyelids were drooping against his will.

'What the hell, yes, you're brilliant', he responded kindly and frankly honest.

'Because I was talking about a minute's worth of time?'

John's head collapsed to the side as he fell unconscious. He would never be able to see the sudden flash of worry and guilt on the other's face, nor the gentle gestures he had as he leaned over him to check him out. In the end he opted to sit back down by his side in some sort of useless vigil.

'I was very frozen, John. And you were as unresponsive as now. My phone wasn't working, waterlogged. I assaulted your pockets. Found your keys, your coins, and finally your phone. I should have realized where it was from the start but I let emotion get the best of me. Your phone worked so I used it to place some calls and get us here. I can't take you home yet. Here will have to do. It's not a bad place. Just have to watch out for the Old Psychic Cannibal, she's got it in for us. But I'll tell you about her when you wake up, John. You need to rest now.' (You saved my life on that river, John, instead of focusing on saving your own.) 'You're as annoying as it gets, John.'


	24. Chapter 24

_A/N: Sorry I was away, can't edit a thing on my phone. May have needed a better phone and a few less tens of thousands of people at work, yesterday. (Yes, I really mean literally what I wrote, just- just don't ask.) I needed to make sure to add this next line._

_Alert: I'm fairly sure this first section is a bit creepy (for lack of a better word) to some people, __and if it makes you squirm, then please move on to the (relief) section next._

_There will be no further similar gratuitous-squirm alerts arising (I checked)._

_I have no excuse, except that maybe it unites the first part of the story, where the case comes to the detective and the blogger by means of a bullet entering 221B, and the second part, starting when the former soldier shot a bullet out of the Watsons residence._

_Oh, how in the world is your mind like, C- ? ("that's me by the way, Hi!" - direct quoting now, to divert attentions...). -csf_

* * *

-ooo-

'Please hold very still now', John directed as he held up the needle. Sherlock looked at him silently. He had full confidence on John's abilities to start with. And then there was that empathic but stern professional attitude with which he addressed every bruise Sherlock ever had returned to 221B with, or the outcome of a close call on a knife fight. Sure, he had preached Sherlock care and security, but all the while a tinge of a smile in the corner of his lips seemed to defy "how many of them did you get?" and the very next time John was by his side to share his battles with complete disregard for his own safety.

John prepared the material they had borrowed of a first aid kit with a tense expression on his face. This was not a grateful task on him. Fixing his friend was a good thing, having to hurt him in order to do it was close to unbearable and required the numbing of all his senses, one by one. This was why rules and regulations had been invented to prevent doctors to tend to patients they were too close to, and John was surely too close to Sherlock now.

Sherlock watched the cold stone expression in Dr. Watson, realizing how much John didn't want to be his doctor right then. But why was that any different from chicken soup on a flu or ice on a sprained ankle? John had never backed down before, and he'd never back down now, so why go through the whole process complaining and doing it anyway was beyond his friend's understanding.

Sherlock couldn't help to flinch on the first approach of the needle to skin, even if he knew what was coming and knew he could endure much worse. He saw John take a deep breath like it was hurting him as much.

John whispered in an emotionless voice: 'If you could pay attention, please, I might need you to redo mine. They aren't right. I shouldn't ask you, and it's one of the worse things I'll ever ask you in my life, and I understand if you say No.'

His hands were working fast and light, dextrous and precise. Properly medicated, the second and third punctures had been expected and it had mostly been the weird feeling of thread running through that affected Sherlock.

'Yes, of course, what you need.'

'There, it's done. Sorry it took so long.'

'Double knot again. It's like a signature, you just can't help yourself... John, are you alright?'

'Light-headed, that's all. I'm fine.'

'How long do you think it'll take me?'

'A bit longer than me. Not too long, you've got a good teacher', he joked. He covered his work with fresh bandages and finally drew a deep breath out. 'So...?'

'Yes, I said "yes".'

Sherlock picked needle and thread and disinfected them. John leaned back against the circus tent wall. Reaching for the alcohol bottle he took a few good sips.

'Don't be so childish', his friend teased to clear the air some. John laughed.

'All doctors are the worst patients... Okay, one by one, let's start at this side, it's the easy one. It's going to be like a freaking computer game.'

'Is it?'

'Of course it is. There's not much to it, either. And you're a certified genius, you got this, Sherlock. Ready?'

Sherlock nodded. Strangely enough he never said the word. But John pushed through. Some blood surfaced the edges, not much, to Sherlock's relief. He took the needle and followed the instructions for placement that John provided, clear, scientific, detached, calculated words out of some medical textbook. The very thing that could get him at ease. Motivated he pushed the instrument in. There was a disguised gasp in John's breathing, his pupils dilated in an instinctive response to pain.

'Sorry.' Sherlock stared at John's face. Was this going to be like that all the time? (You can't do this to me, John.)

'Didn't feel a thing', he lied, and smiled to pacify his friend. 'Go on, knot.'

'One down.' Sherlock felt a certain relief.

'Yes.' He was breathing in deeper, with shallow intervals. He was pushing himself to control all his reactions, Sherlock noticed.

'Next', Sherlock said. Confidence growing from his first success.

'Maybe a bit faster, now', John asked.

'What do you mean?'

'Well, I guess we've got all night', he backtracked his request.

'No, no, I can be faster, sure. Ready?'

John nodded briefly and he inserted it with trembling fingers. No, he had to control it, he had to do it better... John's hand came over his, frozen dead-like fingers that still held all their dexterity guided him along the path and abandoned him as soon as it came out the other way. His breathing was now shallow, and there was a lot of red coming out, sending Sherlock close to a panic attack.

'John, John what is happening?' Sherlock really needed to know, his brain was blanking of all logic and knowledge.

'Sensitive area, you're doing fine, ignore it. Don't freak out on me, you aren't done yet.'

'Can you do it?'

There was a pained expression in John's eyes as he smiled and took over. 'Sure, I'll do it. Can you hold the mirror up for me?'

'Mirror, yes, mirror...'

Sherlock's hands were shaking as he abandoned his work and held up the mirror for John to see.

'You're a natural at this', John said, but his voice was going weird now. And so were his eyes. And there kept coming off a lot of red, Sherlock noticed. Then it dawned on him, John was going into shock. The sweat over his face, the cold hands, the contracted pupils, the eerily drowned voice. John was crashing himself by trying to doctor his wound on his own after the toll of helping his friend. That's was why doctors should attend to themselves first, like parents and oxygen masks on airplanes, he of all people who hold rules and regulations dear should know that, why had he ignored it?

'John', he stopped his hand short. 'I can do it. Just breath deep and keep talking about something, anything, not this, not what is going on here.' Sherlock was back in control, his reasoning had pushed through, John was in his now safe steady hands.

'I'm not in shock, Sherlock.' The doctor saw right through it, and tried to calm his friend down, it was obvious he knew he was approaching it.

'Tell me about your sister', Sherlock asked.

'Don't be silly, you've met her.' John flinched as _it_ was going through him. Sherlock may not be able to name in his mind the piece of metal but as long as he performed a menial manual task of no great significance he could pull through.

'What does she do for a living?' Sherlock insisted.

'You've already deduced it, why should I answer you?' he smiled, it was a compliment. Bleeding his shoulder out in a freakish circus tent and he still complimented the detective.

'Prove me wrong, won't you try?' Sherlock defied.

'Fine... She's a teacher and...' This time he let out a little gasp, but that awful look on his eyes was fading into a stronger gaze. Sherlock insisted:

'How many cats?'

'Four, I think. But if she had it her way might have been a dozen. She really likes cats.'

'You like cats.' Sherlock recalled.

'Yeah, but not a dozen...' Common sense, good old John was so fond of it.

(Last one, hang in there.) 'And your lactose allergy?' Sherlock questioned next.

'Not even sure I got one... _Holly- !_... Sorry! I meant to say "good job", really good job.' Compliments, again. (Still feels as the wrong damned time for them, John.)

'Liar... There, it's done, the worst part of it at least. Are you still breathing?'

'Technically, if I'm speaking then...'

Sherlock frowned on him, feeling relieved it was over and he'd made it through. Hell, and that John had made it through as well, at Sherlock's hands, it was no small victory. 'Don't be smart.'

'Never!' he pretended to vow. 'Can I see it?'

Sherlock pulled up the mirror. John looked at it, inspecting with a fake disinterest. 'Good job', he repeated.

'Liar, I said.' Sherlock leaned against the wall as well, by his side. He was feeling good now it was over, the panic was gone.

'I mean it', he actually insisted as he covered the shoulder with a bandage. 'And I apologise too. I should never have placed you in this spot, you...'

'Shut up, John, to save your strengths. Tomorrow we're back on the run. And this better be the last time you have me rummaging through your... red thing.'

'"Red thing"?'

'You're a doctor, surely you know what it is.'

John giggled. 'You can't say "blood"? You say it a lot at a crime scene, Sherlock, and you experiment with it in your improvised lab of a kitchen.' Sherlock smiled at last.

'It doesn't bother me there.' (It's not yours, John.)

'Fair enough', John conceded. He looked exhausted. As he fell asleep, he drifted slowly towards his friend. Sherlock just let him lean against him, as he kept a watchful eye over the entrance of the tent for the Old Psychic Cannibal.

-ooo-

If John had it his way he'd be playing poker with the two acrobats and the magician for another hour before they left. If Sherlock hadn't insisted it was time to go, John would have lost all his cash, his phone and maybe some clothes gambling. If John hadn't insisted on one last game, Sherlock wouldn't have sat down to join them, understood very fast who was cheating and how to turn it in their favour. That way, they both walked out of there with five hundred pounds profit each, new sweaters (that's what they needed, to be fair) and the respect of all those at the table.

But it was definitely time to leave. As the attractive Romanian woman who presented the show in the arena came to talk to them in her sequels long evening gown, high heels, and red shiny lips, her foreign accent gave charms to her goodbyes.

'Nice to have had the chance to repay you for old times, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.'

'Nice to see the business is doing fine, Ms. Rina', he answered. John looked over at him, interested. That must have been one of those cases John had been left out off. Contrary to popular belief, there were plenty of those, some because they were prior to their friendship, some because Sherlock hadn't invited him, for unknown reasons (possibly closely related to that morality clause).

'Took me three years to rebuild the smuggling ring you torn apart', John looked over at her, confused. (She owed Sherlock a favour to start with?) 'I'd do anything to escape the Baron. Giving up and starting over was easy. Do you like what I built here?'

'Lovely, too bad we need to go.'

She smiled and blinked provocatively at him. 'Too bad, yes... And, Sherlock, we're even now.' He nodded, and then they left. Sherlock waited a couple of seconds to remember, idly, as he and John walked off: 'She is actually a great runner, for a woman with a wooden leg, that was the basis for the whole operation, years ago.'

John just had to look over his shoulder to the woman walking away in sensual high heeled steps. 'Really?!' Sherlock just smiled.

'And that is why you shouldn't play poker, John. How many times need I tell you that?'

'Shut up, we won.'

'Thanks to me', Sherlock said pointedly.

'I knew you'd join in only if I was already loosing badly, it's not rocket science...' John said in his turn, smiling smugly. Sherlock cursed, staring at him. They hailed a cab nearby.

'For the record, John, you're the only person who does that.' Sherlock clarified as he opened the cab door.

'Do what? Play poker badly to win?'

'Play me well.'

John smiled and closed the door shut after them. 'I don't, really. For instance, I never got to convince you to come over to my house, Sherlock. Plenty of times I've invited you, too.'

'You don't like it in Baker Street anymore, John?'

'There you go, changing the subject. Of course I do. It's sort of... _home_. Not at all like my home when I was growing up, I don't mean it like that. It's much cosier and...' he was struggling for words.

'Your childhood home wasn't "cosy"?' Sherlock repeated looking at the view of the streets they rolled by.

'No, it was, it was, I mean... You understand, right?'

'Not really, no.'

'My father was just sort of... so my house was just sort of... No, sorry, no words yet. Not even therapy can help me, I suppose.'

'You're welcomed at my place anytime.'

'Thanks, but I'm not a runaway child, Sherlock.' His voice was a touch harsh.

'_Because_ I don't want you to stop coming back to Baker Street', Sherlock added.

'Sorry?'

'I don't want to go to your place because then it's two against one. You and Mary would stop going to my place, I'd be always going to yours.'

'Oh. Well, now I know, it doesn't have to be like that', John assured him.

'If you stopped going to my place, soon you'd stop coming along on our cases.'

'No, of course not, it's not going to be like that.'

'And when you stop coming along on our cases you start developing weird food allergies', Sherlock ended it on a funny note. John giggled.

'I'm not even sure I have...'

'You have. I looked it up on one of your old medical textbooks you left behind, by your chair, second shelf. You should know these things, you're a doctor, John.'

'We're not supposed to diagnose ourselves, you know...' He took a deep breath. 'It didn't feel _safe_, Sherlock, that's the word. Baker Street does, and I know that's crazy, it just does.'

This time Sherlock didn't reply, as he always did. He just glanced over at John, and John pretended not to notice anything but the landscape outside the cab until Sherlock looked away again. A secret for a secret; Sherlock knew John had come through at great personal difficulty because Sherlock had come clean first. John was the only one that understood him, he really felt that.

They were heading towards a new location. Sure they should have been avoiding cabs still but John was hardly strong enough to walk around London districts by foot and in busses. As he sat by his friend's side, he must have known he was being watched carefully. It didn't help that Sherlock was a (renowned) detective. Still, as Sherlock looked upon John he evaluated the recent weight loss (the darned food allergy didn't help, nor the time in and out of hospitals), the sheet white tinge on his demeanour from all the blood loss (there's that word again, he can say it again, apparently), the haggard expression of a man who's haunted (both by the police and his actions), and it hardly made him health magazine cover material. All the more reasons to watch him carefully over the next few days.

(The worst, John, is now gone, and the ending is near. It all should have been a lazy evening in Baker Street, like old days. We'll fix this and redo that plan, we'll make sure of that.)

John's phone rang; a strangely out of pitch sound that the resuscitated phone could gargle up after the river water had sipped into its systems. He took it off his pocket and they both stared at it.

'I think it says _Greg'_, John evaluated the damaged screen.

'Four letters, I concur. Still, lots of people with four letter names.'

'I don't think it's _Mary_ or _Molly_.'

'_Molly_ is a five letter name.'

'Oh. Still _Yard_ is four letters long.' John wouldn't take the call.

'_Yard_? You wrote _Yard_ for the _Scotland Yard's_ phone number?'

'I thought it would save time, Sherlock. How about your phone, is it working now?'

'I'll get a new one, waterproof.'

The small apparatus stopped ringing at last. 'Let's hope they'll text.'

'We wouldn't be able to read much on there, John.'

'Oh... I would like to know that Mary is alright, though.' John confessed that with as much detachment as he could, the detachment a fugitive of the law should have under the circumstances, but it was fairly obvious that the thought had been weighting him down.

John was married now, John had a wife. 'What is it like to have someone you are always worrying about?' Sherlock asked out of curiosity.

'Why would I answer you? You already seem to know.' True, still it took his friend by surprise that John would admit knowing he was under scrutiny.

'We do some of our best conversations in cabs now, John.'

'We are very messed up indeed.'


	25. Chapter 25

-ooo-

The travel of the two fugitives would be a long one, given that in the last day they had strayed off London considerably. They split it between several cabs, as to maintain them the more untraceable. All in all, they were now returning to the epicentre of danger, for Sherlock's latest refuge.

'We need a plan.'

Sherlock snapped out of his long thought process loop and stared at John. 'Why do you keep saying that?' It was getting annoying, John's faith in Sherlock's plans, when all Sherlock could try was to keep them safe for now.

'Because we seriously need one.' John was dead serious. And stubborn.

'Go ahead then.' Sherlock challenged him, still short-tempered.

'Not me, you! This mess is now beyond any plan I can master, only you can get us out of this mess, now!'

Sherlock rolled his eyes, but disguised it by looking out the window. For once, John's eternal belief in Sherlock's almost super-human powers was taxing him. He didn't have a plan. He hardly had a good hideout. John probably figured they were back at London centre to wrap the case up, but Sherlock was drawing blanks on their most important case. He was trying to protect John, and Mary, and even himself, but right now he owed John the point-blank truth. 'Well... hm... I don't have a plan. Not yet, at least.' Well, so much for the cold-hearted truth. He was scanning John's expression now, worried how he would react.

'So, we keep hiding?' John returned, mostly oblivious to Sherlock's inner dialogue.

'Basically, that's it.'

John fidgeted on the upholstered seat, not ready to give in just yet. 'Maybe someone else can help us. We could try to talk to your brother, Mycroft.'

'Are you seriously wanting to talk to Mycroft? That's a first.' Sherlock smirked, despite himself.

'Not me, you!' John corrected at once.

Sherlock froze for a couple of seconds. He had just realized that John wanted to reunite Sherlock with his brother, out of some protective streak that called upon family togetherness. Always caring. John was worried about Sherlock. Most of all, what had stunned Sherlock beyond the capability of speech had been not the sweet push for the Holmes' family reunion, it had been that Sherlock had seen it so clearly.

'Are you insisting I meet with my brother, John?'

'Hell, if you want to put it like that, I am.' The former soldier was less than intimidated by a direct comeback.

'Fine.' Sherlock leaned forward and addressed the cab driver with a new address. John smiled softly behind his back, adjusting himself to the upholsters and closing his eyes for a while.

-ooo-

John was seating waiting on a bus station's bench. Busses that he'd never take kept passing him by, such as the constant flow of people coming and going, never really noticing that the man sitting there in a bright green jumper wasn't particularly interested in the busses.

Across the street, Sherlock was meeting with Mycroft, slightly against his will (as per usual, really, as much as he was used to freely admit).

'I wish you'd just return, Sherlock. You've been causing me to... divide my attention. There are more pressing matters at hand than you, if you can entertain the possibility. There are wars and international diplomacy issues that simply cannot be avoided.'

'I'm getting in the way of your work', Sherlock summarised, looking all around in the small bunker of an office. (Well, I'm having a blast, thanks for this, John.)

'Bluntly putting it, yes. I wish you'd just go back to Baker Street and all would return to... whatever normalcy simile you can produce of your life...'

'John's in trouble. They are even dragging me around now.'

'John could take a plea bargain', Mycroft's solution was the easy one. It seemed evident to Sherlock that Mycroft was still affected by his younger brother's injury while at John's side.

'Told you he won't. It's out of the question.'

'Perhaps the jury might view it his way and acquit him.'

'You can't guarantee that, and I won't let him go through a trial. The reporters, the accusations...'

'Are you scared he'd break?' Mycroft forced the question out, he wanted his brother to consider fully the consequences, to visualise them, as a subconscious first move into accepting them.

'A trial is not a way out, Mycroft.'

'He's already a fugitive. How long can he keep running?'

Sherlock sunk back into his chair, pondering the origin of the question. 'You've seen it through the cctv footage. That he's physically drained. Why did it bother _you_? You don't care, you don't believe in caring. Maybe you'd _care_ for me, in your own way, bending your rules. But you've cared for John.'

Mycroft smiled coldly. 'Maybe it's because I have a score to settle with him. You got shot because of him, stupidly pushing him out of the way.' There it was, finally in the open. Blame.

'Your cameras were angled wrong then. It wasn't so. I was trying to keep him safe, yes, but I failed to do so.'

'Maybe I should give you a copy of the footage, then.' He opened a drawer and took out a cd.

'I don't need to see it, I'm sure.'

He pushed the disk forward anyway, persuasively.

'Study the angles. I did. I found them most enlightening.'

Sherlock shook his head. He had better than grainy footage. He had talked to the shooter, and Mary would have never shot John.

'So, you think I took a bullet for him. Mind you, it was far from fatal. What do you intend to do about it?'

'That's between me and John when the time comes. I'm not in a hurry', he commented with a gelid smile. 'He'll still be breathing by the end of it, don't be dramatic, Sherlock', he frowned on his brother.

'You're the one being dramatic, you want to hurt my best friend, and you're telling me about it, which doesn't even make sense!'

'I wanted you to be prepared, you're my brother.'

'Why did I come here for help?' he regretted honestly.

'Why indeed?' Mycroft seemed to agree genuinely, they were both shaking their heads.

'Whatever you think you're doing to him one day, trust me, I'll do it twice as worse on you.'

'Caring, again? Sherlock, just stop it and let him pay for what he did. He really shot someone, he really murdered someone.'

'I'm not that sure.'

'Good grief, are you delusional, now? What kind of hold does that man have on you? You've gone all emotional and ordinary, Sherlock. Get a grip on yourself or I'll have no choice but to pull you out of London, by force.' Mycroft would protect his brother, with or despite him.

Sherlock got up, the very thing he had wanted to do from the start. 'I'll be seeing you around, Mycroft. Congratulations on your diet.'

'Yes', he rolled his eyes, 'have fun running from the Police officers.'

'Will do.'

-ooo-

'Come on, John! Almost there!'

'If I wanted to go on a nature hike, I'd wait till I was no longer a fugitive of the police, Sherlock.'

'Isn't that boring and predictable? I seriously doubt you'd check your police status first, John.'

They smiled. 'Still, Kew Gardens?'

'I'm running out of suitable hideouts', Sherlock confessed. They were walking at a steady pace along the park, studying the scene.

'What's wrong with your regular hideouts?'

'Greg Lestrade knows them.'

'He wouldn't sell us out. Trust me on that. I'm sure.' John assumed it was a question of trust.

'Actually I'm giving him a chance to do so. This way his colleagues at the Yard won't think he's covering for you. I told him to do just that too.'

John stopped short on their walk, breathing hard.

'You sacrificed your usual hideouts for Greg and me. Well, me.'

Sherlock diverged, with a quick glance around. 'Come on, John, we're almost there.'

'And this one is called...?'

'The Blind Greenhouse in Kew Gardens, but don't get so hung up on the names. You can't write this down. What would you call it? "The case where I was both victim and sniper"?'

'Everyone can see I'd never shoot myself if I were the sniper!' John protested out loud. Sherlock looked around the park, preoccupied. He'd prefer to keep them moving along.

'The police was working under the assumption that you did it by hiring someone else for the first two shots, to diverge suspicions from the start. It's not very brilliant, I know, but it's the kind of criminals they seem to be used to.'

'If I had done the shooting I'd have hit every single time, damn it.' There was a dark shadow on John's eyes, and that self-loathing hint of a smile was re-emerging.

'True, but not your best line of defence...' Sherlock pondered.

'So, right now, to the police, I'm a lousy backstabbing poisoning sniper willing to shoot my best friend and...' He halted, shocked. 'Jesus, they must think I kidnapped you!'

'No, I wasn't kidnapped, they think I'm in Russia.'

'Jesus, they think you had to run from me!'

'Will you stop panicking, John?! We still got another half mile to go and there are a lot of potential witnesses in this park. Besides, they wouldn't expect me to run from a criminal!'

'You'd run from me if I was as described in the paper', John pointed out. 'Which actually is quite an accurate description of my overseas proven sniper abilities and chemical knowledge as a doctor so... Jesus, _I really am _a backstabbing poisoning sniper in potential! I'm even a better sniper than they think I am!'

'Of course potentially you are. But you're not, that's the point!' (Look at the potential criminal I'd be, another Moriarty perhaps, and stop freaking out.)

'It's like this whole case was tailor-made for me, Sherlock. The poison on the bullet casings, I could have produced it. Shooting from afar with a rifle? I could have done it further and more accurately. I'm aware of the police procedures, and I'd use your influence and my hit to get involved in the investigations. Even the real target, you, is very close to me, so motive and opportunity are granted... Everyone must be dead certain it was me at this time!'

'No.' Sherlock pronounced calmly.

'What?' John's voice was suddenly weak, lost.

'One big hole in that theory. You wouldn't have shot yourself in the left shoulder. It very nearly finished you off. Everything else makes sense, but _that_ is a deal breaker. That's what I told Greg, he's been letting it go around in the force.'

'Yes, I'm not _that_ stupid, nor is my alter-ego, the backstabbing poisoning sniper... Thanks... Where were we going again?'

'This way. Let's go, people are starting to stare.'

'Why can't people ever leave the two of us alone...'

'I suppose they are _fond_ of us. I can imagine the theories out there', Sherlock frowned.

'No, you and I probably can't even begin to fathom...'

Calmly, Sherlock lead the way across the park, until they reached a smaller, locked-up white washed shed with an iron frame that provided a glass roof and some more windows around the top. Every window had been white washed in paint, presumably to diffuse the light and temperature to the greenery visible inside.

'Orchids', Sherlock explained. 'Rare exotic ones too, that don't appreciate direct sunlight, hence the blinded windows.'

'Orchids?' John repeated.

'Yeah, they grown on tree trunks in the wild, bellow the coverage created by the foliage of the trees and... Never mind, smuggling case once. Might need to delete that memory out, it's not like I need to know this... Still amazed, John?' he couldn't help asking, it wasn't as spectacular as a freak circus, but then again, it was right in the heart of Kew Gardens, and they had just payed for a daily ticket to get to this next safe place.

'Definitely amazed', John confirmed. Sherlock had just forced the lock on the door, and they head inside cautiously and discretely.

The warm humid atmosphere hit them like a breath of heat from a tropical land, and in a minute their clothes were already damp and clinging at their movements. 'Won't be cold in here', Sherlock commented.

'Glad I've once had an anti-malaria shot', John added, in medical humour. 'Shouldn't this place be better locked up? These plants can get to be very expensive.'

'Not our case, John, you may need to focus a little harder.' They were starting to bicker somewhat, out of exhaustion.

They were startled with a small noise just outside, of twigs cracking perhaps under footsteps.

'Someone is out there.'

'Could have been a squirrel', Sherlock say out of nowhere too logic.

'No, I placed those twigs on the path', John insisted.

'Wish you had a gun', Sherlock added frowning, John glared at him, but he was already peaking at the door glass panes. John mimicked him.


	26. Chapter 26

Much to their utter surprise, they'd easily recognise the source of the heavy footsteps outside the blind greenhouse. It was DI Greg Lestrade. John's sigh of relief was quite audible.

It felt nearly unreal to see him again, after what were only a few days, but to the two agitated, short-tempered fugitives, it appeared longer.

'Greg, you found us!' Sherlock opened the door to the man. The DI had a cat-like smile, lighting his face under the spread early greying hair, he knew perfectly well that he had caught them by surprise for once. When he talked, it was with the old warm familiarity he always offered them:

'Well, it wasn't easy, I'll give you guys that. So, how are you? And don't just say "fine" for once.'

Both John and Sherlock smiled, but other than that remained silent.

'Make yourself at home', Sherlock invited. 'It's a bit damp, but it's warm.'

'Any news from Mary?' John asked, tense.

'She's doing fine, everybody is', Greg assured him.

John got up, agitated. 'Let me just check the grounds outside.' It was the soldier in him coming to surface, and he walked stealthily to the painted panned metal door.

Greg interrupted Sherlock's train of thoughts, in a confidential tone of voice: 'Sherlock, John's hand is twitching more, have you noticed?'

He frowned, of course he had noticed. 'So, you saw that too?' (More observant than usual, Greg.)

'I don't know what he told you about it. I know he got nerve damage he won't talk about and that it gets worse when he's down... Sherlock, whatever the fun you're having with John back at your side, you've got to end it soon. His hand is twitching a lot.'

'What do you mean "having fun"?!'

'It's the two of you in danger again, of course I can see the shine in your eyes. Hell, even John enjoys it too. But you need to end this soon for his sake. Don't let the fun blind you of the urgency, right?'

'I would never willingly take longer to solve...' he was flabbergasted, then angry. 'I saw his hand too, I've been watching him closely, and I'll keep doing so...'

They made themselves quiet as John returned, still very tense. 'Don't think anyone noticed Greg coming in.' And with that he looked straight at the newcomer, waiting for answers.

'I've been looking for you all this time, guys...' There was that smug satisfaction smile in DI Lestrade's face, as he studied the two men's response.

'Greg, how did you find us?' Sherlock was almost on the verge of impatient annoyance. John was behind him, stone faced.

'You made little effort to conceal yourselves when you crossed this park. Several good law abiding citizens phoned in your location.'

'As it turned that bad?' Sherlock caught on immediately.

For the first time, the Scotland Yarder hesitated, but then delivered: 'For now, yes, it really hit the news. You might as well have worn the hat, Sherlock', he tried to joke.

'People are identifying me now?'

'We were forced to extend the Look Out on you, yesterday. That's when it hit the headlines. You're far more famous than John.'

John took a seat, closing his eyes in exhaustion. Sherlock defended: 'That's ridiculous. John was there in every one of the cases that hit the news, that made me famous.'

Greg was caught off-guard with that reaction. 'Yeah, but he didn't solve them, did he?'

'Well, I wouldn't have solved them without him!'

Greg was confused. Was Sherlock actually attempting to be nice, including John in the credits, or was he just troubled that his reputation had taken a serious toll?

'Yeah, but he just stands there by your side on the interviews, like he's your bodyguard or something, Sherlock. And you never mention him or his participation, you always say something like "the case I solved" and such...'

'I do?'

Greg noticed he seemed genuinely shocked. 'Yeah, you do that all the time... Is that really a surprise to you?'

(Yes.) Sherlock didn't answer. Instead he turned to check on John's reaction to what had just been pointed out. He found him tiredly closing his eyes, but emotionless.

'John', he said his name, demanding calm attention. His friend opened his eyes. He had understood immediately the sound of the appeal.

'I'm fine. Just closing my eyes, people do that sometimes... Nice to see you here, Greg, but why have you come?'

The guest recalled: 'You weren't answering my calls, and Sherlock's phone isn't even on. I've been following leads on your sightings for hours, now, hoping to find you guys.'

'So it was "Greg", four letter word, Sherlock... Sorry, Greg, both our phones drowned. Mine is hardly functioning and Sherlock's is gone.'

'Well, you guys should have learnt how to use a payphone then, right? Do you guys even know I worry? Mary, Mrs Hudson, Molly, _everyone_ worries. I expected this from Sherlock, not from you, John.'

John was definitely caught off-guard, but he immediately related. 'You're right, I'm truly sorry, Greg.'

Greg wasn't above showing genuine care, usually in looks and polite words, kind social visits and well-meant brotherly advices, though he usually kept them to a minimum to the most closed-off detectives team he had ever met. Neither Sherlock, self-proclaimed sociopath, nor John, war zone veteran, were comfortable at the more explicit displays of proximity. Greg Lestrade knew in the back of his mind that he was crossing a line, but he just couldn't care. He was adamantly scolding John for not having the common sense of letting his friends know that the two wounded fugitives were alive and well.

'I've been worried you guys would turn up dead. And so has everyone else. They kept calling me to make sure I hadn't found you two shot to death. Do you have any idea what it was like to answer the phone, to open an email, knowing it could be one telling me that a bullet had crossed your heads and you were dead? How it was to ponder what I should say when telling everyone in your lives how that had happened?'

'I seriously didn't imagine that, and I'm sorry.' John was troubled to see the emotion displayed so bare in Greg, in a raw display, so uncharacteristic. John tried to reach out with his words, but he still kept his back straight and his face stern like a proud soldier. Only his eyes gave voice to his soul, and his eyes were breaking in painful surprise. 'I just didn't think, I didn't know, I would have never thought, not now, that I'd have so many people on my side, and I...' his voice trailed off.

Greg gave him a heavy stare (how could you not have known?) and slided that same gaze on Sherlock (can you hear this guy?).

Sherlock demanded at once: 'Were there new leads, Greg? The missing body turned up?'

Business. Sherlock was bringing up business. The DI took a seat by their side before he answered, more restrained: 'Yeah, it turned up a quart of a mile away. He was identified as a wanted criminal, sniper for hire. You did the public a favour, John.'

'Wait a minute', Sherlock demanded. 'I never said John did it.'

'I guess not, but it's obvious, innit?'

'I could have done it. Mary could have done it.'

'Sherlock!' John snapped, angrily.

Greg fought back. 'Mary doesn't even know how to handle a firearm and you just don't have the skills to do that kill shot over that distance, Sherlock.' In front of him, Sherlock lowered his gaze in an instinctive admission. Sherlock knew he couldn't have made that shot count, nor could he successfully convince anyone of it.

'It was a defence, Greg. John was defending Mary.'

'That plan got really messed up, Sherlock, no wonder it all went astray... No need to dwell on the past now. Have you come up with a new plan, Sherlock?'

He shook his head briefly (and annoyed).

'Then what the hell were you doing all this time?' he reverted to worried loudmouth Greg. 'This is not going away, Sherlock.'

John snapped angrily: 'We were keeping a move on the guys that were trying to off us. That kept us a bit busy.'

Sherlock added: 'While wounded.'

'Shut up, Sherlock.'

'Yes, John.'

Greg took a deep breath. 'Okay, okay, I get that... Back at the Yard, John is officially our number one suspect, we have to go by the book on this. But we are pushing every lead.'

'Does that line ever pacify anyone?' Sherlock asked, acidly. Greg frowned. He was doing his job, in fact, putting himself on the line when he should have excused himself. There was no need for snarky responses.

The two men in front of him were changed by the events. John was usually a solid presence, but the cracks in his demeanour were all too evident now. He was short-tempered (and the man had managed to live with Sherlock Holmes, that should account for his unusual amount of patience and strength), and borderline paranoid (which in a former soldier was equivalent to several perimeter checks in fast calculating glances out of the cracked open metal door). Sherlock was also less of his calm ethereal demeanour and heavily focused on John, which might have been a good thing at first, but he needed to snap out of it now if he really wanted to solve it all. They couldn't be on the run forever. The both of them were on their limit as it were. Sherlock was subdued and exhausted, John was remarkably thin and pale when compared to his healthy self a week ago.

'Sherlock, you need to focus on getting this solved, so you and John can go back home.'

Sherlock took a deep breath, imagining him and John at Baker Street, complaining of the boredom and lack of exciting cases. And the boredom felt great for once.

'Any leads on the second person at the apartment, the one that took the body?' he asked, flying back to his characteristic crime scene wide gestured rambles . (And why had he taken the body to later abandon it at a distance? It was John's bullet in the body, the police might have not tied the two crime scenes together. He wanted time, he'd done it for time. The only question now was how fatal the pistol's bullet had been. It'd determine everything.)

Sherlock had got up and paced around, gesticulating silently, speaking only in his head. Now he turned to Greg that finally answered him: 'No leads on the real suspect.'

Sherlock waited. 'I've asked you more stuff, if you'd answer...'

'No, you didn't. Ask again.'

Sherlock frowned, impatient. 'Did John's shot kill him?'

Greg saw John take his right hand over his left, trying to conceal the fact that it was shaking badly. 'Yes, after a while, Sherlock. John, are you okay?'

John nodded, angry that he couldn't stop his hand shaking and that he was having a hard time disguising it. Greg must have seen it, John realized, for he kept shooting glances at his shoulder, probably thinking it was his shoulder acting up.

'And the autopsy?'

'They are still doing it. Not Molly. I couldn't let her. It's bad enough I'm involved already...'

'Have them check for poison from nitrates', Sherlock demanded with a confident smile.

'What? He was shot by John!'

'Trust me for once, Greg.'

'What are you on about? I always trust you, Sherlock. Probably too much.'

Sherlock smiled slightly. He was still looking at Greg when he said: 'John, your hand will stop shaking as soon as we get the results from the autopsy, I promise you. So stop worrying, will you?'

John just stared up to his friend, stunned but hopeful. That old look of innocence returning to his features for a brief second. He wanted to ask about it, and complement it, but he knew straight away that the detective would hold back on the explanation till he was proven right. Sherlock did love to be dramatic.

Greg took out his phone and placed a call back to the office, informing them to search for nitrates on "a hunch".

'I hope you're right, Sherlock, but this is still going to take a while', he confided as soon as he ended the call.

'Of course I'm right', the detective protested, dismissively. 'Why do you always doubt me? You should just follow my lead and protest less.'

'That is never going to happen', Greg smirked openly. Sherlock almost pouted at that. (Greg was definitely not John.) 'You guys need anything from out there?'

John shook his head sternly, and Sherlock briefly dispensed the idea of claiming a few luxury items to help spend the time.

'John', Greg insisted personally. 'Answer your damned phone next time. I'll call you when I have news... Hell, if all turns out okay, I'll even come and get you guys myself.'

With one last nod, Greg walked out of the greenhouse. He was thankful for the cool airy breeze outside. The DI wasn't too fond of leaving his two wackiest friends behind, still in a dire situation. They were fugitives of the law now, and with the pressure of public opinion mounting they were in for a hard time if it carried on for a longer time.

He pondered them separately, as he was crossing the park. Sherlock had a secret liking to be the outcast, and a more relaxed notion of the law. Hadn't it been, in many ways, for the influence of John, he'd might have become a fine criminal. And now, on the eyes of the law, it was actually John who was the criminal. Self-defence could only get him so far, in the deep trouble he was in. _Strange twist of events_, Sherlock had actually become a criminal (by aiding a fugitive) and it'd been for the right reasons. It hadn't been "boredom" in the end, but selfless friendship, the same that John had shown him over the years. And Greg could only hope this situation could get fixed, because the two men apart were so much weaker than together. To Greg, Sherlock was always a step away from realising a great potential in a criminal career, and whatever dark stuff John was carrying inside he'd direct it on himself in a waste of a good man, if they were to be forcefully parted.

With a sight of resignation, Greg pulled his phone and dialled the numbers of the people who were waiting for news, trying to sound optimistic and confident.


	27. Chapter 27

-ooo-

Sherlock had been standing very still for the last hour and a half. He had sat with his legs crossed on the concrete slab of the greenhouse's central work table, bellow some of the hanging orchids. These pink orchids in particular had a very long root system that hanged from bellow the basket, and brushed over the curly dark hair of the intruder just bellow whenever he moved a restless inch or another along his thought process. The detective, however, seemed completely oblivious to the scientific approach of mind-sucking plant roots that still confused John. Maybe John should have realized he was starting to get a bit feverish, by his unusual train of thoughts. Maybe he was already attributing it to the stuffy warm atmosphere in the small space, the same that kept his cheeks flustered, and his hands cold.

'_Vanda rothchildiana_ Pink' Sherlock said abruptly, from where he stood without hardly changing his position on the table top, directing his words to his friend. John was startled by his commentary, it was obvious, but the man was a doctor, he didn't need to look back at Sherlock with all that confusion present in his eyes, surely he was able to recognise the name of the species and variety his friend had so precisely pointed out.

'Oh, right, you mean those', John snapped back at last. Or not, though Sherlock. Scientifically trained thought was sometimes missing in the man of action at the other side of the small greenhouse.

'Well, you were staring.'

'I wasn't staring', he lied, 'and my mind wasn't on the flowers to begin with.'

'Orchids', he corrected, with a love for scientific precision.

'Whatever', John bounced back. He didn't even ponder if Sherlock had read an identification plaque or if he knew that by heart because it'd might come up in a case one day.

Sherlock tilted his head. That was more than a disconnection with science. 'How are you doing, John?'

'Same as before', he assured, cryptically. And it was probably a true statement, given that he hadn't specified the first point in time to exert his comparison with. Sherlock frowned.

Ah, yes, _the waiting game_. John had never particularly excelled in that. To be honest, neither had Sherlock. And maybe that was how he knew what needed to be done to give an impression of continuity and fulfillment to his friend.

'We're leaving, John.'

'What? Why? Another hideout?'

'Something like that.' Broadly speaking, of course. They were going back on the road. John, like he had predicted, jumped to the chance for some action, some shine found its way back into his gaze. Sitting around waiting was common sense glory, but it just failed to fulfill the most insane pair of adventurers in London.

-ooo-

Mary was a bloody mess; or at least that's what it felt like for her. News of her husband had been scarce to none in the last days. Greg Lestrade, Molly Hooper and Mrs Hudson all gave her comforting words about the boys, but she could read their masked concern with ease. More than that, all sorts of strange disturbing rumours had been surfacing about John in the media. She knew they weren't true, she knew well the man behind them. But John wouldn't take them lightly. Worst even than all that, John was at the well-intended but dysfunctional metaphorical hands of Sherlock, of all people. The man who hardly could produce a cup of tea without assistance and kept all his socks colour coordinated along his drawer (but deserved the award for the messiest living room in London).

In the last ten minutes Lestrade had changed it all. One phone call had set Mary's nerve more at ease. Now she felt drained, as if she had been running a marathon all along. Like the one she was trying to make right now, across London in order to reach Kew Gardens. She needed to see John, to look at him, to feel him, to be sure he was alright. Curses to Sherlock, right now she couldn't care less if Sherlock was alright, but John was a different matter all together. An obsessive streak in her love life was commanding her decision to rush to a cab and mentally curse its slowly steady pace.

Unfortunately, by the time she'd get there, Sherlock and John were not there anymore.

The greenhouse was empty, hot and damp from too many plants cluttering the space. What was that space? Why had Sherlock brought John there? There was no rhyme nor reason to Sherlock's hideouts, but Mary struggled to make a puzzle out of them. Some sort of map leading her forward to meet John again.

-ooo-

The fast food joint was crowded and full, bursting sounds of conversations melting from table to table, all around them. Anonymity in numbers, as it were, still they'd have to keep moving so to be sure that no one reported their whereabouts to the police.

'I thought you'd never enter a place like this, Sherlock. How are you fighting your urge to deduce everyone in here?'

Sherlock tilted his head to the side. 'I may, or may not, have deduced the totality of the people in here. Skimmed deductions, obviously, with little detail. Enough to satisfy me that the two undercover policemen on the table on the far corner to your right are on a stake out of the suited man with golden cuff links at the window balcony. I don't think they are on to us. For two men who receive payment to observe and report, they seem to have missed out on the opportunity to recognise any other wanted criminal.'

'Good for us, I suppose', John noticed, resigned. 'How are your fries?'

'Incomprehensively soggy for potatoes fried in a computerised temperature controlled media. And yours?'

'Lame, as well.'

'I'm sorry', Sherlock started a new conversation, 'that the long list of chemical ingredients added to the composed foods in this place restricts all together the list of things you could actually order, John.'

'I'm lactose intolerant, at best, I'll survive, surely... Anyone else in here interests you particularly, Sherlock?' he started over, with mild curiosity.

'You know you could deduce people yourself, John', Sherlock pointed out, but in his voice there was no desire to refrain from the topic.

'Yeah, well, I suck at it, and you make a living of it. You just want to have a good laugh at my expense, Sherlock.'

'Certainly not. Go ahead. Schoolgirls on the table to your right.'

John frowned. Was he really going to do that? When had the tables turned and now he was the one left to deduct?

Sherlock waited, approvingly.

'Fine...' He glanced quickly. Schoolgirls in uniform, crushes on the boys band hit of the moment. By the glasses one worn she was very nearsighted. Another was clearly left handed (was that even a deduction since it mattered to no one?). Two of them might be cousins or another form of relatives since they shared the same genetic traces of a maxillary dysfunction, hardly worth mentioning. John said out loud: 'Two cousins, a left handed one and the last one needs a new pair of glasses.'

All the while, Sherlock had been taking the chance to have a good look and deduction on John. He could never do it anymore, since John could always tell when he was being scrutinised and it upset him. Now he had been distracted in an exercise that would have taken Sherlock a mere second. John Watson. When had he become so pale that Sherlock could have traced the blue trail of the veins on the back of his right hand, holding the food mid air? His blue eyes were focused and alert but the sunken dark patches under his gaze suggested a further need to rest and rehydrate. His broad strong shoulders were as stiff as to be expected given the circumstances, and explained the slight brow compression that John was keeping for the last hours, as a reflex of the pain his shoulder wound was giving him.

'Missed much, Sherlock?' John woke him of his thoughts.

'Some', Sherlock admitted, pushing John's water bottle closer to its owner.

'Go on, then.'

'You'd just get upset.'

'Humour me', he insisted.

'Fine. The girl with the glasses is the daughter of divorced parents that seem more caught up in their fights then paying attention to her needs, as you so rightly pointed out, she needs a new prescription for a pair of glasses, but she has an expansive phone that suggests she's a good manipulator of her parents' situation and probably guilt induced them to buy it for her. She'll be fine, she has adjusted, then. The two girls are false twins, and not cousins, you can tell that by the bag packs, an absurd habit from her parents to keep them living identical lives by buying the objects they possess in identical pairs, more than by the physical similarities. If further proof is required, they both have the same chlorine rash on their necks from a home pool that has been badly balanced, so they live together. It could have been a sleep over for one time, but that level of rash suggests repetitive immersion in the chlorine water, which in turn suggests more sisters than a visiting cousin. The left handed girl is a good tennis player, as the bandage wrist impression by her hand suggests, and I'm fairly sure that she has a good opening shot. She probably started playing only this year, though, because she's not that serious into the trainings if she's eating foods like this.'

'Oh.'

'Nice try, though, John. You are growing better by the try.'

'You might not want to patronise me. I shoot better than you.'

Sherlock smirked.

An electronic drowning noise caught their attention, coming from John's pocket, and they crossed gazes. 'I bet you it's a four letter word, Sherlock.'


	28. Chapter 28

-ooo-

The police car was rolling through the streets of London quietly, with Greg at the wheel, Sherlock by his side and John at the back. The news of them being cleared by favour of the forensic evidence had come roughly at lunch hour and Greg had set off to get them straight away. As he drove them back to Baker Street (statements delayed till the next day as a special favour) he could notice how giddy and relieved Sherlock was in particular, even if he tried to avoid letting it show (and John was still as cool as a _stiff_ cucumber, in the back).

'You were right, Sherlock. There were nitrates in the blood stream, and a very high dose at that. It changes everything', Greg noted.

'Does it?' a cold tense voice doubted from the back seat, and refused to say more.

'Of course it does.' He looked over at Sherlock and realized that he was allowing Greg to explain it all. 'You shot him, John, to defend Mary, right? The shot was possibly one of the best I've seen, when we factor the distance and the conditions. You manage to hit the shooter, just not fatally...'

'If it wasn't fatal, how come the police didn't pick up on that from the moment they found the body?'

'You did hit a kidney, I think. Internal bleeding, messy thing. Still a hell of a shot.'

Sherlock realized: 'The widest area in the body, that really was a pondered shot, John, and by the book.'

John interjected: 'There is no book.'

'Of course there is. You were trained to hit the torso, because it's easier than the head. It's your military training kicking in.' This time John kept silent, his jaw tightly clenched, a hint of a self-depreciative dark glow in his gaze.

Greg resumed: 'The shooter was not alone. The mastermind, as you like to call him Sherlock, was there. He couldn't risk this hired gunman to talk so he forced the nitrates drug on him. The shots fired had alerted the police so he knew he had to run. What he didn't know was if the poisoned shot man was going to live long enough to spill the beans, so he forced him out of there with him and pushed for a few blocks till he eventually left him behind to be found already dead... That's what happened, John.'

There was no response from the backseat. Sherlock added in a calm steady voice: 'The shot wasn't fatal, which means that you can get away with a self-defence story now. The real murderer is the man that poisoned the man you shot, he's the real reason the man died. That acquits both you and me, John.'

Greg added: 'We'll downplay your firearm skills as a lucky shot, John. It's easier to buy, too. Not a hand full of people I know could have done a shot like that on purpose...'

'For heaven's sake, the man is a doctor...' Sherlock came back.

'Someone has been selling great stories to the press...'

'Great sister you've got there, John...'

Greg turned more serious. 'The police can still tie John's gun to your other illegal stuff, though. Seriously, Sherlock? The greatest mind of the century and you never thought of changing guns every once in a while?'

'Easy to say _now'_, he mumbled.

'Well, this case is so much bigger than those other ones that they can get stalled, I suppose.'

'So, can we use the gun again?' Sherlock asked hopefully.

'No!'

'Fine... John, I'll get you another one for your birthday.'

'I'll pretend I didn't even hear that', said Greg, pointedly.

'When is your birthday, again?'

'Well, it's better than the one you gave him last time.'

'I don't remember what I gave him last year.'

'I said "last time", Sherlock.' Another pointed look.

'Oh. Right, I wasn't here last year. What I meant is I don't remember the time before that...'

'A gun is hardly appropriate... but strangely adequate for once.'

Greg would drop them off by the door of 221, where Mrs Hudson already stood, smiling and embracing their return. Sherlock and John thanked him before exiting to the street. It felt oddly quiet and peaceful, like returning home.

-ooo-

221B Baker Street, living room. Dingy little place with the daylight flooding in a number of kick-knacks, mismatched items that altogether seemed to form a simile of a living space for some mad man. Cluttered, covered in dust, randomly ordered (or just plain messy according to the degree of honesty of the renter). Still, Sherlock would smile comfortably at the sight of the familiar dwellings, the best refuge of all in London. He looked behind him to assess John's intake. His friend had a smile on. One of those smiles that reminded him of a dazed child in utter happiness, a innocence driven smile that Sherlock only seemed to recognise out of the face of that one particular hardened person. Not all the old ghosts he carried or hardships recently endured had washed down that smile.

Behind them, by the door, stood Mrs Hudson. Her eyes had been set on Sherlock the whole time. She was expecting his complaints on the dust cleaning, on the coffee table being some mysterious two inches to the right, or something. She saw him scrutinize the interiors of the flat in one long glance, then look back on John. And she realized that John was long part of the list of Baker Street contents that made it complete in that mad man's eyes. She could have told Sherlock right then and there that John wasn't an item, to stop thinking he belonged in Baker Street, John had his own life now, that's what happens when you tragically disappear for two years... But she decided to wait for a time alone with Sherlock to have that conversation. John being there wouldn't help, with his bright eyed smile... He probably had missed it too, there was a fulfilment in John when he came around, like returning to your family's home after a hard time. And John didn't have much of a family but that one in Baker Street.

Mrs H had been there when Greg had phoned Harry Watson. The DI knew it had to be done, the newspapers were on the verge of printing the most awful things about John. She only heard Greg's side of the phone call, of course. Polite, confident, declaring his trust on John and his regrets on the present situation, a true gentleman. Greg never told Mrs H exactly what Harry had said. But his face was unfriendly when he hung up the call. Silently he faced Mrs H before cryptically summarising: 'Luckily he has us, Mrs Hudson.'

And then, of course, the next day the false stories on John were all over the cheapest newspapers. Sad stories on him being a criminal for hire that had set a trap on Sherlock. Some stories were twisted and hurtful, but Mrs H felt she needed to read them all, to keep them all under close check, to be herself a defender of the slandered man, if only the one of all the readers. John should know that at least someone out there knew they weren't true. No, not John, he really wasn't anything like that. A touch stiff, sure, and usually stone calm until he rarely lost his temper in short bursts that always ended abashed and apologetic. Definitely not a cold blooded murderer. (And she had known her fair share of those, mind you.)

There was one story in particular that shook Mrs Hudson's ground, though. It felt too personal, too knowledgeable of the Watson's family household. The reporter must have got information from a relative. About the loss of the parents, later brother and sister as orphans bouncing around distant relatives until they were old enough to be on their own. And that had suddenly slowed the world down for Mrs Hudson, as she lowered the paper. John, her John, Sherlock's John, bouncing around from house to house, not even old enough to be called a man yet, just a boy, no home to fall back on. And from there to medical college, and the army. In a way, still looking for belonging. Then to a nasty war, until he was injured and rendered useless for the ones who had been using his skills all along. Back to London all alone, a while later, Mrs H had met him and greeted him and Sherlock at the door, and saw nothing of this but a controlled stiff polite man with good manners waiting outside. "Mrs Hudson, this is Dr. Watson." But she had focused on Sherlock instead. She had secretly been scared he'd move out of Baker Street out of sheer restlessness. That never happened, of course. John had been introduced to a flat dominated by Sherlock's stuff. But then again, John never seemed to have much stuff of his own. A mug, a computer, some odd bits, some charity's shop clothes he'd pick up on his return to London. He was a man that hardly clung on to something material (much unlike Mrs H's husband, mind you). And now she understood why, reading John's story on a tabloid, leaked for money and jealousy. Mrs H was very much disgusted with Harry Watson and it was a good thing John's sister wasn't there at the time, or her ears would have turned very red indeed.

It all had changed, now. John had been cleared (John, a sniper for hire, really lame story; she pondered) and the two men returned home, where they belonged. Mrs H kept staring at the pair, with a warm smile on her face. Everything was going to be okay, now, she could tell.

And John was there. Sherlock was not alone, and that was very good for Sherlock. His mind could be a great one, but he was still very human and vulnerable to depressive fits (he called them being bored) when his mind lacked the challenges. Mrs H did what she could on those occasions to keep the genius child engaged, but John was the one that had always had the right touch for it. He knew how to work with Sherlock when he was being... problematic. He brushed off easily when Sherlock was being downright nasty to wear off the edge of his restlessness, because he could see, like she did, that he really didn't mean it. The two boys got along like they had known each other their entire lives, and now Sherlock really missed John not being around like he once had been. John Watson being there made Baker Street complete in Sherlock Holmes' eyes, Mrs H could see it as night from day.

John made an attempt to joke lightly: 'We keep forgetting to change the floor boards, Sherlock. It will spook the clients, I tell you.'

On the floor by the living room door, the red stain persisted gloomily.

'I might want those for an experiment. You don't mind I use your blood, do you?' Sherlock checked with a smirk.

'Just make it count, I won't offer anymore', John played along. 'I see you can say the word "blood" again.'

'Temporary aphasia, nothing to be ashamed off.' Sherlock's gaze was still on the floor boards. There really was a lot of it. In a short burst of blinded emotion he wandered how much John could have left in his body after all the blood spilling of the last few days. 'John, you should rest.'

'We both should rest', the medical man corrected. He was now in the kitchen, fighting silently with Mrs Hudson to gain control of the electric kettle.

'John, let me have it!' she demanded briskly, motherly. 'You don't need to do this yourself. Go and have a sit in your chair.'

Finally he gave in with a gentle smile. He turned to his friend and directed: 'Sherlock, go to your bed and get some sleep, we've earned a break.'

'And you?' he inquired childishly.

'I'd very much like to lie down a bit on your sofa.'

'_Our_ sofa', he corrected for some reason. 'We have a deal, John.' With a smile he watched John move on to the sofa and holding his left shoulder he just lied down with his blondish hair over one of the larger pillows and his face turned away from them. Sherlock knew why John had chosen the sofa, instead of the empty bedroom upstairs. Because it kept him in the living room to check whether Sherlock would try to go to his computer and solve cases without him. There was a tinge of want on that direction for Sherlock, but his physical exhaustion pushed him to his bedroom instead. With a sweet short embrace of Mrs H, he retired to his bed with relief. (It felt really good to be home, the best refuge of them all.)


	29. Chapter 29

-ooo-

John Watson is snoring lightly, his blond hair contrasting against the green-browns of the velvet pillow he rests his head on. The rest of him has been disguised by a soft grey chequered blanket hours ago and thus remains without his knowledge. Close by, after a couple of hours nap, a stronger, more rested Sherlock has taken his place at the living room table, in front of the computer, sometimes tapping fast at its keys, sometimes just staring hard at the screen.

When Sherlock heard knocks on the exterior door from downstairs (it was Mary's rhythm) he was in one of his staring fits. The images in front of him had been provided ominously by Mycroft, when he venture to believe that his brother's grazed arm had been the consequence of him pulling himself in front of a shot aimed at John instead. Honestly, he knew very well it hadn't happened so. In fact, he knew it first hand, even if all had happened remarkably fast. What had Sherlock going through the footage provided from an awkward angle at the street was the mystery of how Mycroft had misread it so much. The grainy image revealed a much more frazzled Sherlock than he'd like to have recognised himself, entering the cafe, straight to the smaller figure of John (blond hair shining brightly at the electric lights of the cafe, asymmetrical black coat with just one shoulder patch – the one of his frail shoulder missing, how telling). The taller figure called the attention of the smaller one, before furtively looking around and reaching to grab the other man by the elbow (oh, Mycroft must have had a field day with that public display of proximity; that was what had him believe Sherlock already knew what would happen next, that's what made him believe that Sherlock was pulling John out of the way of a speeding bullet). The whole of the cafe occupants reacted simultaneously like a well rehearsed play, ducking down, throwing their arms to their heads, opening their mouths in (now silent) screams. The taller figure spun in place a bit as he fell to the ground. He never hit it though, for the smaller figure grabbed him tightly in his arms, nestled him in them, and protectively covered him with his own body from a second attack. Sherlock stopped the tape. He recalled too well what happened next, over a more intimate point of view than that of the camera.

The frozen image of John protectively embracing Sherlock, in complete disregard for his own life, made him shudder. In a sharp glance he stole a look of the man lying on the sofa. That computer image portrayed the one side of John Watson that truly and intimately scared Sherlock. (Selflessness.)

Mary was coming up the stairs now, and Sherlock quickly tapped the computer keys to change the image on the screen.

'Mary, welcome back', Sherlock offered with a kind smile. 'John will be very pleased to see you.'

She looked around in slight distrust. Why was he kindly smiling? They never smiled at each other anymore. Was there someone else in the room, was Sherlock suspecting John might actually been awake? Because John was snoring too well to be faking his sleep. What she didn't recognise was that Sherlock had been changed by the close proximity with that man.

She smiled back, to be on the safe side. 'You managed to prove him innocent in the end, Sherlock. He was right in trusting you so much.'

'Is that an apology for not placing enough trust in me?'

'We both know John trusts you too much, let's keep it at that.' There was no smile now.

'How was your exile, Mary?'

'Boring, predictable, the same old routine. And I've made it out just fine, unharmed. You didn't tell him, Sherlock', she wanted to hear him confirm.

'I've kept my side of the bargain, Mary.'

'And I kept mine. At a high price. Days without news of my husband, of the man I love.'

'We both know he's been collateral damage from the start. People were after you, not him. Separating you both was the only scenario that offered more safety to all of us, Mary. You can't argue with logic. Not when you are so good at it yourself. John, oh, I'd have a hard time reasoning with him, but you saw the reason, Mary.'

Her face was angered. This seemed to be the only thing that got her off from the calm cold logic conversations they shared, her love for John. Deep inside she felt that it betrayed her somewhat, made her more vulnerable. Sherlock now knew better - it made them stronger in new ways.

'Please note that John is staying here for the next days, Mary, until he chooses to go back to your house.'

She gave him a deathly stare. 'It's not fair, Sherlock.'

'Yes it is. You can stay here as well.'

'It's not the same, Sherlock.'

'If you're missing marital favours, I'll be sure to knock on the door before entering your room upstairs.'

'Now you're just being childish.'

'And you're being possessive.'

'He's my _husband_.'

'He wouldn't be, though, if he knew what I know, would he?'

Definitely no smile on Mary anymore. She finally stared at her husband, snoring against the warm pillows. Sherlock told her, realizing she hadn't asked:

'John's wound reopened at a time, due to physical exercise. We took care of it. It's healing up again, but I doubt it'll ever look good on his shoulder.'

'We need to get the person who did this to him.' She crossed her gaze with his at last. Common ground finally.

'I'm working on it.'

She smiled, breaking her rule. A cold murderous smile. 'What have you got, Sherlock?'

'A list of suspects, at last', and he handed her a handwritten piece of paper. 'They are all names from your past, Mary. You need to narrow this down for me.'

She glanced over the page, losing all colour from her face. 'How do you know about these people? They weren't on the flash drive.'

'Told you, he really didn't look at the flash drive.'

'You'd have made a copy.'

'I didn't.'

'I don't believe you'd miss the opportunity.'

'He asked me not to do it.'

'And you just complied?'

'Yes.'

'Against your curiosity?'

'Yes.'

She still looked suspicious. 'Were did you get these names?'

'From my brother, Mycroft.'

'Great', she was sarcastic, 'your brother knows your best friend is married to an ex-assassin. How sweet of you to keep it all in the family.'

'Please refrain from telling John that Mycroft knows. He suspects it, I evade it, and we prefer to keep it at that.'

'You two are far too intimate, sometimes', she let out, out of hurt.

'Don't fight me over him, Mary', Sherlock told her drily. 'There is no need. He loves you in a different way. And stop trying to be me so to get his full attention. It just throws him off.'

'I'll be darned if I'm ever taking relationship advices from you, Sherlock Holmes.'

He wasn't surprised, and just sighed. He had to try.

'Start with the last one on the list, Sherlock, he's the most vicious.'

'Will you tell John why that name on the list is after us?'

'I can't', she shook her head, unscripted tears erupting in her eyes.

'Fine, I'll keep it a secret too. But, for the record, if there's anyone who'd understand it'd be John.'

'Sometimes I wonder if you're just trying to break us apart, Sherlock. Telling John would be the worst thing I could do. He would never forget.'

She got up slowly, pondering: 'I have some things to do, I'll come back later. Please let me know if he wakes up in the mean time.'

'Will do.'

-ooo-

John woke up a few hours later. He thought the blanket must have come from nowhere and realized there were more people in the kitchen area, he could hear the homely noises they made. He got up to see who was there. Both Sherlock and Mary greeted his return, sited at the kitchen's table.

'Made you some pancakes, and all', she told John, in a sweet tone. 'Had to go shopping too, Sherlock's fridge was highly disappointing.'

John stood by the kitchen entrance a few seconds, numbed from sleep, probably. 'Yeah', he said at last.

Sherlock rolled his eyes, and without looking at Mary over his newspaper, reminded: 'Lactose allergy, Mary.'

John interceded at once. 'I'm sure that just for once I can...'

'I won't let you', Sherlock threatened in the same immobility. 'Nice gesture though, Mary.'

She snapped: 'At least I did something, haven't I, Sherlock?'

John halted then, confused: 'Are you two arguing because of me?!'

'_Yes._'

'_No._'

John's expression changed to a cold no-nonsense one. He reached out for the pancakes plate and hand it briskly over to Sherlock. 'You need to eat, have this. I'll make myself some toast, I can do it on my own, no one needs to take the freaking credits over it.'

They both stared quietly at his short tempered burst.

'_We didn't mean to..._'

'_We really didn't..._'

'Shush it. It's too early in the morning for this, anyway.'

Sherlock folded his newspaper slowly. 'John, it's four o'clock in the afternoon. Please have a sit, you might be a bit feverish again.'

John frowned at him but did sit down. (After all, he had said "please".)

'Why would I be feverish?'

'_You are._'

'_He is._'

'You don't seem to remember', Sherlock reported, 'that you have gunshot hole running air conditioning through your shoulder, but we do.'

'Great, scare him, won't you?' Mary snapped.

John closed his eyes for a second. 'I remember now, anyway. I'll eat something, take an antibiotic and rest some more', he doctored himself. 'Sherlock, remember what I told you once. If I'm not available, just take Mary with you. _Please_ don't go out there blundering after the mastermind alone.'

'No', he said, picking up the paper again.

'Sherlock...'

'I mean I'm not going anywhere without you, John.'

'Oh... Thanks.'

Mary frowned.


	30. Chapter 30

-ooo-

John would spend the rest of the afternoon sleeping the medication off, oblivious to Sherlock's work on the case from the safety of his computer, and with Greg Lestrade's assistance by (his new) phone. In fact, he'd miss out on all of that, and on Mrs Hudson often coming up to smother Sherlock with tender loving care and prays that he wouldn't overexert his hurt arm. Sherlock would smile, and watch her spread the chequered blanked back over John at the sofa many times (that in his sleep he would shrug off every time).

Dinner time would come uneventful, but with a touch of homeliness, as Sherlock, John, Mrs H and Mary took seats at the crowded kitchen table. To the first three it felt like old times indeed, with the added bonus for John of feeling like the complete package of a family as Mary stood there as well.

John was the first to get up from the table, requesting Mrs H to leave it all there, he'd take care of the mess in the morning. She told him off. He insisted. She threatened him without sincerity. Sherlock smirked. As soon as John was up the stairs to his old bedroom, Sherlock added from nowhere: 'You'd better refrain from further activities with him tonight, Mary'.

'Sherlock', she politely called his name in a question.

'He's in no condition for marital favours yet.'

She widened her eyes. That was way out of line. Mrs H intervened: 'We don't talk about those things, Sherlock dear.' Nothing seemed to surprise that woman, Mary glared.

'Just trying to defend John.'

'Not exactly defenceless', Mary argued back.

'Well, if he starts vomiting or gets dizzy...'

She tried to kill him with a death stare. 'We're not going to...' she interrupted, tense.

'Oh, then why didn't you say that from the start? You might have saved me the time and the embarrassment.'

'You, embarrassed?'

John came back at that point, innocently oblivious. 'What did I miss?' _Funny_, Sherlock thought, how he had picked up on something right away.

'Nothing, dear', Mrs H told him, 'just our Sherlock being Sherlock.' And John smiled softly.

'Well, in that case I think I'm off for the night... Thanks again for letting me crash in, Mrs H.'

'I'm glad to have you over, make sure you keep the heating on all night', she mothered him. He'd still glance at Mary but realized she wasn't going up just yet. That felt odd. Not that she'd not be as tired as him. Just that she seemed more distant upon their return, more engaged in petty small fights with Sherlock, rather than spending time with him. Or maybe it was all in his mind. He was a tad tired, after all.

'Night, y'all', he wished as he left.

Sherlock decided 'I'm off to take a shower' before the kitchen table mess could be taken upon him.

Not even five minutes later, Mrs H came up to Mary with a couple of cups of nice tea, handing her one of them. Then she took a seat in front of her, as they shared the chairs by the fireplace.

'He's being insufferable', Mary complained tiredly, out of John's chair.

'Who, Sherlock? Well, you did shoot him, dear. It gives him the right to do whatever he likes.'

'Mrs Hudson?' she was genuinely shocked.

'Sorry, dear, but Sherlock is my boy, and sticking by his side on this one. Besides, he's just trying to get to you. Just ignore him and it'll go away.'

'He's coming between me and John.'

'He's really not. Like I said, brush it off and it'll go away.'

'He told John not to eat my pancakes!' she blurted out, ignoring the fact that the woman next to her had showed her loyalty to the other side and a wish to end the conversation, albeit politely.

'John has this allergy to milk, it's really not Sherlock's fault...'

'It's to all lactose products, Mrs Hudson.'

'Well, then, how in the world can he eat pancakes?'

Mary was about to scream her lungs off. Instead she took a few deep breaths and got up. 'I'll just pop upstairs, to see if he's okay.'

'I'm sure he is. Or he'd have called Sherlock for help.'

Mrs H saw Mary leave the room, fuming and puffing. She had to hold a giggle. It was a bit evil but it was fun. It had started with a small revenge on her shooting Sherlock (that was a nasty habit, really) and a reminder to give John some space (he was far too kind to tell her himself to back off once in a while, always trying to pacify everyone).

Sherlock came out of his shower at last, hair still damp, fully clothed with pant trousers and shirt, even that late at night. He was really hansom. And slightly vain, too, like all young people are. 'Want a cup of tea, dear?'

He smiled at the sight of her in his chair. 'I think we drove the Watsons off, Mrs H.'

'Then it's probably time I'm off too, a woman of my advanced age... Just, Sherlock, dear...'

'Hm?'

'Don't stay up late, working on the case. John would worry about you not resting enough.'

'I'm fine.'

'Sherlock, he'd blame himself for your exhaustion.'

'That hardly makes any sense!' And yet, it's so _John-like_ that Sherlock promises: 'Won't stay up past midnight.'

Mrs H smiles and leaves for the night.

-ooo-

Despite Sherlock's good intentions, midnight comes and goes, and dawn comes and settles into full blown morning light across the Baler Street's living room, to find Sherlock pacing over the carpet in circles. Brooding over papers filled with diagrams, photographs, maps, firearm catalogues and posted notes on the side.

'Sherlock...' John worried, coming downstairs first, still in pyjama bottoms and a simple t-shirt, messy hair and mismatched coloured socks (one a caramel yellowish and the other a burgundy red; definitely Mary's influence). 'Have you got any rest?'

Sherlock shots a glance at him, then at his wristwatch. Before he can say anything he knows he has given himself away. 'I'll retire early today', he negotiates.

'Fine, you can go as early as right now', John snaps angrily at him, as a commanding Captain.

'I see you're feeling better', Sherlock is not fazed at all.

'Yeah, all cleared of any sign of trouble', he agrees back to his normal voice. Then he raises it up again: 'If I ever catch you doing another sleepless night just after being shot...'

'_Grazed_. Don't feel guilty, please, I had no intention of staying up, it sort of happened.'

'Who said anything about guilt?' John asked, diverting his gaze through the room.

'Mrs H. She explained it to me.'

'Damn it. Okay, I admit. I feel guilty.'

'Don't, I won't do this again, and I feel fine.'

'We both know what "fine" means.'

'"Fine" means "tired but kicking along", right? Well, that's exactly what I mean. You can keep an eye on me while we have breakfast and I tell you all about my new plans.'

John finally gave in. 'Into the kitchen and you have to eat everything I tell you', he commanded. Sherlock smirked. Captain John Watson. Mismatched coloured socks and all (that was probably Sherlock's fault, when he packed him the overnight bag), he was still strangely impressive and incredibly serious.

Coffee steaming hot and toasts ready to pop up, John was standing by the open fridge, peering inside. 'Sherlock, where's the butter, the milk?'

'You can't have them.'

'I know that. But you can. Where are they?'

'I threw them out', he shrugged. 'Didn't want you making some mistake.'

'Sherlock!?'

'What you wanted them for, anyway? Science?' John frowned at him, only to understand he is honestly asking if it was for some experiment, he's not rubbing it in on John.

'Breakfast for Mary. Thought she might enjoy it.'

'Oh', he pondered for a second. 'Well, she'll need to get used to your allergies, you share a home.'

John shut the fridge door too strongly (home habit) and got back to the kitchen table just by the time the toasts came up. Sherlock shared them silently between them as John refilled the toaster. None of them found it weird that after years apart, their domesticity was still so well-aligned.

'Greg will come in before nine, John.'

'Good... But we could have gone to the Yard ourselves.'

'Didn't know if you could go out yet when I arranged it yesterday. No point in changing it now, he must be' Sherlock glanced at his watch 'coming up five blocks away.'

'Right... How long would you have stayed indoors, postponing your plans, waiting for me to be healthier?'

He shrugged. 'Terribly sorry, but no more than four days. Perhaps five. No more than five, I think. I had to weight in the fact that the end resolution of our case was as healing to you as your long naps and medications.'

John took another bite at the empty toast. 'That long then?' he seemed surprised about five days, not about Sherlock having pondered it scientifically. Sherlock frowned at the question.

'Told you, John, you're my people... How long would you last?' he sipped his coffee cup (horrible without milk, alas).

'Two weeks, I think', John said like an unimportant data.

'I'm still learning.'

'You're my people too. Actually, you already know it. You said it yourself.' Sherlock smirked at his words. John pretended not to notice or he'd might get too cocky.

John sipped his coffee and wondered: 'What did you tell Mary yesterday? She's pissed off with you, Sherlock.'

'Told her not to share marital favours with you yet.'

John slowly raised his eyes from the cup onto his friend. 'Yeah, that might have pissed off anyone... Why did you want to annoy her, then?'

Sherlock smirked, John had seen right through it. 'She wanted to take you home, earlier that afternoon.'

'I'm not a piece of property.'

'My point exactly.'

John sighed, he doubted Sherlock had got the right "point", but it was pointless. And it made him happy even if he didn't want to admit it, to see those two bicker like two loving brother and sister.

The toasts popped and once again they repeated the routine of sharing and refilling.

'So, you think you know who the mastermind is, Sherlock?'

'Yes', he retorted confidently.

'And the why?'

Sherlock didn't know what to answer. He didn't want to lie openly to John, but he knew John would be too hurt if he knew what Mary had been keeping from him.

'No, maybe Greg can help us with that', he ended up lying, and he didn't enjoy it.

John sipped his coffee slowly. 'Why did you just lie? Will you ever explain it to me?'

Sherlock almost chocked on his own coffee, startled that John had seen right through him. Before he could answer he got lucky and the exterior door bell rang. 'I'll get it, must be Greg', he quickly took advantage of it. John let it slide this time, without looking up from his toast.

Greg and Sherlock came up immediately, John was already getting another plate for Greg and a cup of coffee. 'Have a seat, Inspector', Sherlock invited, sitting as well.

'Thanks, guys. You two feeling better?'

'_Fine_.'

'_Fine_...'

'Yeah, what else is new?' Greg openly mocked their answer. The toaster spit its contents up and Sherlock took them out while John refilled it, in the same coordinated gestures as always. Greg swallowed a fit of laughter at it.

'The novelty is in a suspect, Greg. We finally have one', John told him.

'About damned time too', Sherlock added. Greg didn't comment he was starting to curse more freely, John's influence probably.

'Give me everything you've got, Sherlock. I need to catch the man who did this to you guys.'

'So do we.' Sherlock pushed a folder onto the Inspector. John had to remember he had stayed up all night most probably.

'I need a fast shower, especially if we're off to the Yard now', John realized all of a sudden.

Greg saw him trail off, mindlessly, frowning at the mismatched coloured socks. He moved himself better though, and seemed to be gathering his strengths.

'Are we really close to catching this guy at last, Sherlock?' In front of him the detective smiled.

'You better make sure he pays, Greg, or I will.'

Greg Lestrade didn't like that tone of voice he heard, but he could hardly blame Sherlock. He opened the file and went through the papers silently. It detailed who he was, his past experience and ability to plan the thing and pin it on John Watson. There were police reports leaked to the press, witness accounts, the lot. 'What's with the blacked out parts, Sherlock?'

'That? Oh, I don't know, got it like that myself', he lied.

'Where did you get this from? Why would they black this out?'

'Can't recall. Haven't got a clue why.'

'Should I care about this blanks?' Greg was studying Sherlock's detached expression.

'I would prefer if you didn't', was his answer.

'Okay, gotcha', Greg played along, John was just passing by them again with a bundle of clean clothes. 'Five minutes, John?'

'Sure', John agreed, 'I'll be ready. Sherlock, the toasts?' And the toasts popped out. John locked himself in the bathroom.

Sherlock commented, absent-minded, as he tackled the toasts and offered them to Greg as well: 'He could always do that, count the time down to the second. Haven't got a clue how he does it...'

'I suppose this is like the old times for the two of you', Greg remarked.

'Yes, it's always been the same toaster.' Sherlock still seemed to be contemplating how John timed the toasts so perfectly, missing the point.

'You know he's going to go home soon, Sherlock', Greg worried. Sherlock sometimes had the maturity of a small child. He was bound to miss John terribly. But then again he had left London for two years and carried on like he hadn't missed John for a second. Sherlock was a weird man, one who would not answer him right now. Greg looked back at the file on his hands.


	31. Chapter 31

-ooo-

All day long Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson trailed Scotland Yard's corridors, ignoring the strange, confused looks that police officers and secretaries shot at them. The first had wrapped himself up in his long coat and puffed the collar up as if a barrier to their annoying looks. The other man was darting polite warm smiles around that all of a sudden seemed strangely misplaced in a man with the hidden army and medical talents that the press had exploited. Sherlock was about to warn John to quit the _niceness_ when he realized that it was actually succeeding in making people shake their heads minutely when John turned away, clearly brushing away the stories they had read in the press as twisted lies. John's _niceness_ was the perfect wall of privacy that social conventions could master. Sherlock was sure that in a week's time John would be back in the late pints and soccer matches reunions at the bar like he always had been. Little did they know that he could actually do a crack shot with steady hands to take a justified life, or immerse those same skillful hands in a patient's blood to save a person's life. And Sherlock wouldn't be the one to tell them that.

The sun was setting when the tip came in. A man matching the mastermind's description had been spotted entering the old industrial site where the old ammunition bunker had been sealed off by the police.

'I guess he ran out of bullets', said Greg, grabbing his coat. 'Wanna come along?' Sherlock and John just smiled dangerously. No one would have held them back.

As they climbed in the police car, Greg got more personal to the two men sharing the vehicle. There was almost a father-like tinge to his voice, even if the age difference wasn't significant enough to warrant the familial sentiment. 'I know you want to catch this guy, Sherlock, because of what he did, especially what he put John through. I know you want to make him pay, and I bet you've been bulking on the scenarios in which you can make that happen in the past days.' By his side, Sherlock visibly sulked at being deduced. Greg glanced at John to find out John wasn't going to be the voice of reason either. The dark look in his eyes offered more of a backup promise to Sherlock than a desire to pursue his own revenge, and neither of those reactions were the ones Greg wanted to enhance. 'We are not letting him fall through the cracks of justice, guys. But right now you need to mind yourselves first. You can't do anything stupid so shortly after the lies that were spread in the papers. Most of all, you two want things to go back the way they were. Baker Street on occasion, a shared mystery to solve, an adventure that has you both running the streets of London while I race as well to give you guys backup. Hell, even I want that. And if you do rush decisions this evening, it's all going to go away... Sherlock, I know you think of yourself too highly to trust fully in my police force, I've come to terms with that. But you've been fighting the last few days to keep John out of trial and jail, don't let him do anything stupid now. And John, remember your oath as a doctor, you have no excuses to walk out on it.'

Sherlock frowned. 'Aren't you telling John to keep me out of trouble as well?!' he seemed insulted, Greg noticed as he tried to hide a smirk.

'It felt redundant... Guys, if for no other reason than this, _do it for me_. Don't get me in deep shit.'

Greg heard the deep breaths both of them let out, in defeat. They had heard him, what he had to say, and they'd comply against their instincts. 'Ta... Sherlock, the glove compartment, there is my extra gun in there. Hand it to John, will you? John, this is a gun registered to me. I'm only handing it to you because you two can't go into this defenceless. Anything you do with that gun is officially my doing. Don't get me kicked out of the force, okay?'

'Yes, Greg', he said, respectfully, as he took the gun in his hands. Skilfully, almost as in an everyday event, he opened the gun, checked the bullets and lifted it slightly to check for the balance, before pulling it back down, still secured. 'So this is what the Yard uses', he stroke up conversation.

'Not enough fire power for you?' Greg noticed.

'Too much, if you only let me bluff tonight', John maintained, with a polite smile. Greg picked up on the emotion concealed.

'I'll be darned if I ever know how you became a doctor in the first place.'

Sherlock intervened: 'Don't read too many papers, Greg. John is a doctor first and foremost.'

'How would you know?'

(He keeps all that past bottled up in terrifying nightmares, for once...) 'I've lived with the man for quite some time. He never missed a chance to try to persuade me to eat and rest properly. And he's not stopped since either.' John glanced at him, with a surprised quiet smile. That was as a quiet thankful acknowledgement as he was ever bound to get out of Sherlock, specially in the presence of another living breathing human being.

Greg pulled the car to the old building, halting the conversation. 'No signs on the suspect', he noted, coldly, as they all looked over at the ruins of old industrial civilization tributes.

They were the first to arrive to the scene. Backup would follow swiftly if proved needed. They entered the building's enthrals with careful light steps and guns withdrawn. It felt cold, damp and empty for weeks, but the first impression wasn't to be trusted. They were dealing with a very dangerous man with a twisted revengeful agenda, out to get them.

'Guys, I'll secure the smaller rooms', Greg whispered, as he diverted from the pair. Probably they didn't really hear him, too concentrated on the darkened area and the possible hideouts.

It took a few minutes before one of them noticed something was wrong.

'Greg?! Sherlock, he's gone!' John's voice was understandingly worried. Sherlock turned to face him and the empty room.

'Greg's fine. The man isn't after him.'

'Are you sure? Because you won't tell me who he is, or why he's after us.'

'I can tell you he's not after Greg', Sherlock was adamant. John rolled his eyes to his friend secrecy act, but he looked relieved all the same. Greg must have just wondered off in his investigation.

Just then a small bust distinct metal noise erupted from the back of the building. Sherlock and John didn't even look at each other, they just bolted running towards the source of the noise. John pulled out the gun, as a safety precaution.

As they reached the main room in the back, it was immersed in darkness, and the pale light of the street lamps outside was hardly enough to discern the aligned rows of machinery and chairs where workmen had produced goods back in the days the factory was running. Plenty of hiding spaces between the ruins of the rusted machinery, plus an overhead balcony at the end, presumably where the manager's office had been located. John felt the hairs in the back of his neck stand up. It was eerily quiet, like a battlefield empty village waiting to be drenched in insurgent fight. It didn't feel right, and there were too many danger spots in there.

'Careful, Sherlock, this is a trap', he warned the obvious.

'I know...' his friend answered absent-minded. 'I wonder what he wants from us, why is he playing us like this?'

'What do you mean?' John couldn't understand. 'This is how it's done. You make a trap and you gun your enemies down. Trust me, I've been in enough traps in the war to know how they work...'

'This is still for you, John', Sherlock realized.

'What?!' John was shocked and for a second his attention faltered. Luckily, the first shot missed him by an inch to his right. As an immediate reaction he rolled out of sight of the sniper and raised his pistol into the end of the machine rows. By his side, Sherlock had taken cover as well, looking all around them, desperately trying to decipher the precise location of the man, and where he was heading. Because Sherlock was sure, the man was on the move.

'I think you can shoot now, John. Greg would have shot back.'

'I know. Still, I'm trying to avoid him having to explain why he came in with two official guns.'

'He was feeling superstitious!' Sherlock found an easy excuse, as he darted a dark look to John. (What are you waiting for, John, we're in danger here!)

'Calm down, Sherlock...' John said in a very quiet voice, the breathing under control, his pupils dilated in an effort to discern movements in the darkness, but to no avail. The detective shot him a heavy look.

'I can't see him either, John.'

'Keep a look out for me, will you?' he asked quietly, then he drew the gun down and, still crouching against one of the desk machines, he closed his eyes and held his breath.

Sherlock's eyes widened in surprise, and he quickly had to catch himself before he called John. He trusted the ex-army doctor, even if he didn't quite understand what was the point of him shutting himself down in that dangerous scenario. Then John spoke softly: 'I can hear two sets of breathing in here, besides yours, Sherlock. Both at the back of the room. One of them was the person that just shot at us. I've got him.' In a swift motion John Watson got up from the floor, arm extended in front of him, exposing himself as he fired on single precisely calculated shot into the back of the room. A strange sound of a gulp followed by a blind thud echoed in the factory as John came back down into hiding immediately. John glanced at Sherlock and realized he had to vocalise: 'I hit his safety vest, and he fell backwards. Now all hell will break loose.'

Sherlock didn't bother asking how come John and him didn't have bullet proof vests on as well. The sounds produced at the end side of the room showed hurried footsteps of the man on the run. 'Hurry, we're not letting him get away!' Sherlock shouted, as a war cry.

John was racing as well, right on his heel. They crossed the industrial room in a couple of seconds after the man had escaped it through a back door. As they reached for the door, it wouldn't open. 'He bolted it somehow from the other side, John!'

'Right', John said with a smirk, and shot a bullet to the nearest window, crashing the wide window pane. 'This way, then.'

'I knew you couldn't help yourself from firing that gun some more', Sherlock mocked, as John was pushing himself over the window to the outside. It took a couple of seconds before he heard him hit the ground on the other side and by then Sherlock already knew why, looking out the window. They were one store high up. John was already getting up safely from the asphalt bellow and Sherlock jumped next, after him. He hit the floor with ease and reflexes provided by all the adrenaline rushing through his body.

'Down there!' Sherlock located, somewhere behind John. Then it all happened too fast for Sherlock to impede it. The man was aiming his rifle at John – how come it was always John? The instrumental rock for both Sherlock and Mary alike – and John had hardly spun himself around to face the man, let alone lock an aim for the gun in his hand. Sherlock's legs were protesting as he was trying to reach John, to protect John somehow, John was all that mattered now, but he knew deep inside he was too late. Finally the gunshot blast was audible, ending the cursed game.

* * *

_A/N: I'm realizing this constitutes a cliffhanger. Oh. I was never fond of those, but sometimes it's the right way to end a scene.  
__(Suddenly) last chapter is next. -csf_


	32. Chapter 32

-ooo-

'It was a clean shot to the head', Greg noted, standing over the dead body. 'There was nothing anyone could have done about it.'

John got up slowly, his face tinged with a mix of pity and coldness. 'Yeah, there was no point in checking for vitals, but I had to, anyway', he felt the need to explain himself, his doctor impulse.

'One thing is for sure, that wasn't my gun doing it.'

'Oh, right!' John seemed surprised, as he looked at his hands, confused.

'It's here', Sherlock admonished him, 'you dropped it when you rushed to see if you could save the man's life.' Sherlock handed the gun back to the detective inspector.

'You sound angry', John noticed. Greg just stared at them both, in silence.

'There was another person in the warehouse, you heard two people there. That second person shot our murderer for us. I thought you were going to get shot too, John. _You freaked me out!_'

John smirked sadly. 'I had forgotten about the second man, sorry.'

Sherlock turned to Greg, angrily. 'Next time, I want a gun too.'

'I only had one extra gun, Sherlock', Greg told him, patiently.

'Then I'll take Donovan's, or any other useless agent's one.'

'Donovan is not useless, you're just being childish... Come now, I'll give you guys a ride back to Baker Street and we'll do the report tomorrow... And Sherlock, John, you guys are safe now. Really safe. Enjoy it a bit before you go out on another dangerous man hunt again, okay?'

John nodded in agreement, he was starting to feel rightfully exhausted. 'Are we ever going to find out his exact motives?'

Greg shrugged, but he couldn't help glancing at Sherlock. Out loud he said: 'The second shooter, the one you can't identify did you guys a favour and left. I'd hold on to that luck if I were you, guys. Of course I'll investigate any lead he may have left behind, but I'm not actually counting on much. You two were the only ones who could have seen anything but it was pitch dark, sadly.'

Sherlock added: 'Maybe someone from the past that caught up with the man, or an overzealous police officer. The investigations are the only way to tell, now. Not even Mycroft's cctv cameras could answer us now.'

John sighed before he could help himself. He guessed he may never get the answers he needed to make sense of it all. At least they were safe, and that was all that mattered. 'Baker Street, then', he agreed, with a sincere smile on his lips.

As the three man exit the scene, other officers and emergency workers are arriving at the scene. Sherlock smirked and asked softly: 'So you'll stay the night in Baker Street, John?'

'I'm sure Mary won't mind one last night, now... And we need to plan for others. How about every end of the month, for old times' sake?'

'The last of the month? How mundane, John!' Sherlock frowned.

John nodded, Greg was concealing his laughter. 'How about every time there is a new moon then?' John played along.

'Better', Sherlock conceded, after all that was a slightly smaller interval. 'And every time there is a thunder storm?'

'Why a thund-... Never mind, I think I can work with it. Though that's mainly on winters.'

'Ah, right. And every time there's a heat wave then.'

'No way! Baker Street is insufferable at heat waves!' John protested.

'I insist.' Sherlock was just being childish now, John was sure, but then he remembered heat waves had a knack for making him have those embarrassing nightmares he still hated to submit Mary to.

'Fine, heat waves...' He admitted with an eye roll that sent Greg into out loud laughter.

'And London Philharmonic Orchestra concert dates.'

'Fine', John conceded with a shrug. How many of those could there be? He was a little disappointed Sherlock stopped there, though. And it'd be only in the next days that he'd come to figure out on his computer that the Philharmonic had quite a busy schedule. He'd find himself smiling to his computer screen, bright-eyed. Sherlock had tricked him, and for once he was enjoying it.

-ooo- |( extra plot twist )| -ooo-

At the door of 221B Baker Street, John had just separated himself from Sherlock with the promise of getting them some take away food before the little shop in the corner closed for the day. Either way, it allowed sweet Mrs H to mother Sherlock all she wanted after the dangerous situation of _her boys_, hopefully relieving John of having to be mothered as well. Now that the adrenaline had died down, John was feeling light, free, and overall happy with the world. Hardly the right frame of mind to accompany Mrs Hudson's feverish attempts to assure _her boys_ that all was going to be safe now. As much as he cared for her, he wasn't sure he wouldn't say something wrong to her, too careless, or just too happy.

John had just been going down the street with his mind on the ongoing drama series developing in Baker Street's living room, or kitchen, when he noticed something was off. He frowned, alone in the empty street. He had too much experience in dangerous enemy territory scenarios not to sense that he was being followed right then. He took out his phone from his pocket, trying to reach out for help. It was dead, and wouldn't come back on. The Thames had finally won. John wished he still had his gun, a faithful companion that always seemed to tip the scale back to the side of his good fortune. No point, now. He'd lost it for good. Whatever action took place in the next couple of minutes, John would have to face it with just himself to make it right. He tried to listen attentively, there was a faint electronic noise trailing behind him, from his shadow. An ear piece, perhaps. That meant backup. It wasn't looking good. He was walking down an empty street, completely deserted as it seemed, no help in sight. John fisted his hands in his pockets, getting himself worked up to fight by force.

Only he hadn't the chance. From somewhere behind him came the attack. Unpredictable, strong-willed, expert moves tackled him to the ground from behind. The pain as he hit the head to the asphalt dozed him, but John had too much adrenaline pumping in his veins now and he managed to shrug it off. He hit his assailant with his elbow, sending him off him for a second. He turned around quickly to face the man. He had dark clothes and his face remained in the shadows as he'd lunch himself back on John, this time stabbing him with the tip of a needle. Drugs flushed into his body, scarying him, stunning him. He punched the man off him, struggled to get up, had to punch him again at his new advancement, and staggered forward only to find he had suddenly lost all will, and his surroundings were growing blurry. Darkness descended upon him before he could register the collapse of his body against the concrete pavement. He probably should have screamed, in pain or for help, but training had taught him otherwise and the thought never occurred to him.

-ooo-

'Doctor John Watson', the man in front of him greeted in fake niceties, as he came to, bluntly tied to a chair in the middle of an industrial nowhere. They were both in the shadows, but specially John. He took advantage of the dark to try to beat the ropes binding his wrists together behind his back.

'Mycroft? What the- ?'

'Don't be vulgar, if you could. I brought you here for another one of our little talks, away from my brother.'

'I don't remember being tied up the last times. Is this a kink thing for you?' John provoked him.

Mycroft rolled his eyes. 'Still a tad vulgar, wouldn't you say?'

'Must be the drugs or the ropes sinking into my bones. Let me out.'

'Still saying the wrong things, John. Why don't you ask me why I brought you here?'

'I assume you're insane. I don't expect a good answer, therefore I won't bother asking.'

'I see you don't bring up my brother to try to emotionally blackmail me to free you.'

'I'm used to dealing with enough creeps on a daily basis to have learnt it's always about Sherlock, I stopped questioning you all.'

Mycroft pondered, tilting his head to the side.

'With you, I sometimes wonder if I'm talking to Dr. Watson, Captain Watson, or to John. It's like a multiple personality thing, that you can snap from one to the next just like _that'_ he snapped his fingers in the air. 'I assume I'm meeting the Captain. You're not looking selfless enough to be the doctor and not stunned enough to be simply John.'

'If anyone here is going mad with splitting personalities, I'd put my money on you, Mycroft. What is this show all for?'

'To persuade you.'

'To do what for you?'

'Nothing what so ever. Just to _see_.'

'See what?'

'The one you love for what they are.'

John frowned, he had stopped fighting the ropes behind his back before he'd even realized it. 'What are you on about?'

'Oh, hello there John.' With a flick of Mycroft's umbrella someone surveying them flashed on all the lights of the industrial complex. John flinched with the shock on his eyes. But he'd still catch a fleeting movement on an overhead balcony. He immediately glanced at it. A sniper, expertly placed to insure further cooperation (honestly, he was tied up and still groggy; a bit scared Mycroft?). Then his heart jolted as he recognised the person staring down from above, agony spreading over her face as well now. _Mary_. His Mary.

'Silly me, I believe you've met before', Mycroft said out loud. And to Mary he added: 'The payment as gone through, Mrs Watson. You can leave at any time, your job here is done.' And he leaned over to John, who was stone cold and dead white, and with a small blade set him free at once.

John gulped drily, he felt a lump on his throat, his head was buzzing, a cold wave running through him. 'Need you go through all this drama?' he questioned back, in a voice that grew stronger by the second.

'I am a Holmes after all', he answered smartly, but with little joy in his triumph. 'Can I offer you a ride home?'

'I dispense the ride.'

'Though so. I'll be seeing you around, Doctor Watson. Tell my brother the score is settled, and I'd never hurt you physically. Despite what he thinks I actually care about you, John. You've helped my brother very much, and I've kept that in mind.'

John didn't answer, nor did he understand at that point. Mycroft left walking slowly, John had his gaze focused on the overhead balcony as he got up from his restrictions, eyeing Mary Watson.

All of a sudden, he now knew who had been the benefactor shooter in the decadent warehouse.

He understood Sherlock's secrecy about the shooter's motives.

He learnt Mary's ongoing true nature, and why she kept it a secret.

And he knew where he stood.

Took more than that to shake John Watson's foundations.

* * *

_A/N: Sincere thanks for sticking around till the end. That's the most important thing I needed to say. __I'll take a page of Sherlock and John's book and keep it restrained, for once. __(Feels like I've already over-abused A/Ns.) -csf_


End file.
